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51 - Secret Wars
118 Plays14 days ago
Here it is, folks. The Big One. The Event to End* All Events (*start). It's the Toy Company-mandated Jim Stupid-penned Super-Hero Epic SECRET WARS! And, of course, the X-Men are in it. Or something approximating the X-Men.
Matt and Pat struggle their way through this very long saga and have a lot more fun discussing it than reading it.
Issues: Marvel Super-Heroes Secret Wars (1984) #1-12
Topics Discussed:
Professor X forgot. Galactus and the Wrecking Crew are equals. YOU'RE BEING MEAN TO DOOM. "Ach Nein Zein!" All the good guys fight all the bad guys. The planet's mysterious energies fix Jim Stupid's errors. Spider-Man's gonna rat on ya! The Weight of a Mountain. Everyone's worse than Hitler. The Size of a Solar System. Reed flailing! The chicken feather incident. Dazzler's murder of Klaw. Xavier's power is a joke. "SHUT UP, CYCLOPS!" The New Spider-Woman is here now... The Wasp is DEFINITELY dead. Thing has a good burn. Enchantress just complaining. An arrow hits harder than a bullet. The Wasp was NOT dead, she was just in some death-like stasis. Fightin' Doink-Its. Chippies. The funniest page turn reveal in history!
Timestamps:
1:00 - History of Secret Wars
22:40 - Pat's Email Corner
35:15 - Weapon Jason's recap of Marvel Super-Heroes coming into Secret Wars
42:00 - Did we do anything Secret?
45:15 - Secret Wars Issue #1
57:23- Secret Wars Issue #2
1:05:25 - Secret Wars Issue #3
1:12:25 - Secret Wars Issue #4
1:23:30 - Secret Wars Issue #5
1:30:41 - Secret Wars Issue #6
1:42:25 - CHECK IN
1:46:27 - Secret Wars Issue #7
1:55:00 - Secret Wars Issue #8
2:02:57 - Secret Wars Issue #9
2:08:46 - Secret Wars Issue #10
2:16:52 - Secret Wars Issue #11
2:29:50 - Secret Wars Issue #12
2:44:55 - Pat's Steals and Deals!
2:49:23 - Ending
2:53:54 - SECRET JOKE
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Transcript
Introduction and Microphone Apology
00:00:00
Speaker
Hey everyone, just want to chime in here before the episode gets started. There is a problem with my microphone for about the first third of this episode.
00:00:10
Speaker
it does get fixed at around the hour mark. I apologize. Otherwise, i think this is a fun one.
Live Report and Podcast Introduction
00:00:19
Speaker
Enjoy. I'm Trish Tobey with W.A.R.C. reporting to you live from Westchester, New York, where there appears to be some sort of mutant menace on the loose.
00:00:54
Speaker
Hey, everybody, I'm Matt Aukamp. And I'm Pat Reber. And say it with us, Pete. Welcome to Mute Menace.
Reflecting on Marvel's Secret Wars
00:01:10
Speaker
Hey, Patrick. Tough one today, Matt. Man, Yes, this has been a tough day both of us. i yeah Listeners will see from just like the title what we're talking about today. oh, gosh.
00:01:27
Speaker
Oh, goodness. Oh, my stars. Just watching a grown man play with action figures is literally and all we've done today and then had to write about it. It wasn't fun. It was not as fun as that sounds.
00:01:43
Speaker
Because I would love that. But yeah, today covering Secret Wars. Marvel superheroes. Secret yeah wars Not the good one. so let's shout out our sources. ah We got Marvel
Source Material for the Episode
00:01:59
Speaker
Comics, The Untold Story by Sean Howe.
00:02:02
Speaker
Unbelievable book. If you want to know the history of Marvel, if you want to see some of the complicated characters behind the scenes, it is an incredible read. All the Marvels by Douglas Wolk.
00:02:14
Speaker
Another one just a man trying to interpret the entire Marvel universe as one cohesive story. and then Slugfest Inside the Epic 50-Year Battle Between Marvel and DC by Reed Tucker. It's just a look at like how the companies were just constantly battling, constantly arguing, and trading talent back and forth um in usually very hostile ways.
00:02:42
Speaker
yeah An incredible book.
Importance of Background Knowledge
00:02:44
Speaker
Those are pretty much our three sources that we're relying on today. For a lot of our... the metatextual analysis of this yeah yes there's a lot of context that we're going to provide before we go into this because it is far far more interesting than the story itself the contextual analysis that's a you're right that's a much better way to say it because uh metatextually is all just us
00:03:15
Speaker
Going, what the fuck was this guy thinking?
Controversial Figures in Marvel History
00:03:18
Speaker
yeah We're going to do a lot of both here. So where the where the fuck did this come from, Patrick? Well, one thing we should start with, this is the brainchild of one man who you and I, I think famously you don't care for to the point that for the most part, we've refused to say his actual name on air. Yeah, he's he's a really controversial figure in Marvel history, and we have to admit that he did some good work like right up top, trying to transition from the, say, Silver Age to the Bronze Age. But then as comics started to evolve into the cool thing that he made, he was he was trying to make them!
00:04:02
Speaker
He just consistently stood in their way as a sort stubborn, egotistic, sellout-y creep. And this is a big turning point for him, and we'll get into why, but...
00:04:17
Speaker
We're going to mention his name a lot here. we're going to drop some of the facade here and stop trying to make up a new silly name every time we get to him. We're just going to use his
Secret Wars Creation and Release
00:04:26
Speaker
real name here. This was written by Jim Stupid.
00:04:30
Speaker
um And we should say artist Mike Zeck and Bob Layton, who comes in for two issues, probably because Jim Stupid and Mike Zeck were arguing so much. Yeah.
00:04:43
Speaker
Inked by John Beatty, Jack Abel and Mike Esposito do a single issue. Colored by Christy Scheel, lettered by Joe Rosen, and edited by Tom DeFalco, who is kind of ah Jim Stupid's right-hand man on this.
00:05:01
Speaker
And if we're getting into the details, released every month in 1984, starting January 24th, 1984 and ending December 25th, 1984.
00:05:14
Speaker
Which you pointed out to me just before we recorded. Yeah, i I'm not sure how we can count that as a release date. if there' Who was selling that on Christmas Day? Who was hoping on Christmas Day?
00:05:28
Speaker
Who's shipping those out, you
Marvel vs DC Rivalry
00:05:30
Speaker
know? But yeah that's what the Marvel Wiki says, and they know far more than we do. It is true that Christmas has become more and more the thing that we know it today as over the 20th century.
00:05:45
Speaker
It is possible that more people worked on Christmas Day in 1984 than do today. Sure, sure. Like Bob Cratchit.
00:05:55
Speaker
Bob Cratchit was there selling all Jim stupid's dumb books. All right. So, okay. Where did this thing fricking come from?
00:06:06
Speaker
There's a few different points you can call out as a starting point, right? they The crux here is that DC and Marvel were not friends at the time.
Stan Lee vs Jack Kirby Conflict
00:06:17
Speaker
It was the, as you recall, the Teen Titans and Marvel crossover that was supposed to spin out into a few other DC Marvel crossovers until the editors got really nasty with each other. Yeah. That caused a rift. So DC and Marvel at this point are...
00:06:34
Speaker
in heavy competition with each other. Yeah. Jack Kirby, right around the same time, very publicly discusses how much he dislikes Stan Lee, how much Stan e ah stole his work, the idea that he wrote all the comics. The only thing Stan Lee did was actually write the words into the bubbles.
00:06:54
Speaker
Now, this is we should say, even amongst comic book fans, even amongst Jack Kirby fans, is highly contested. How much Jack Kirby versus Stan Lee contributed is yeah a big mystery, but...
00:07:10
Speaker
you know for a fact that it was less than what stan lee claimed uh less than what stan lee claimed probably more than what jack kirby claimed somewhere in the middle and i'm gonna put that middle slightly closer to the jack kirby side yes in in fact in this interview he also claims he invented spider-man which it's like look i I can't say isn't true, but... But you didn't even draw the guy, man. Yeah, yeah. that's So DC jumps on this, right? They had just recently had Kirby on staff doing New Gods. It ended on kind of a an incomplete note. So they approached at Kirby. They said, hey, what if we did a collection of all the New Gods comics?
00:08:00
Speaker
This time we pay you creator royalties on those
Jim Stupid's Big Bang Idea
00:08:05
Speaker
comics. And we're also coming out with a toy line with Kenner for Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, all our key characters. What if we also gave you royalties for those toy sales?
00:08:18
Speaker
Right. At this time, also, there were some rumors flying around about Jim Stupid. He wanted to do a big bang in Marvel, where yes his whole he had this whole idea where basically every Marvel character, there'd be a big bang in the sky, and all the the old heroes would die, and all the new heroes, like, there'd be a bunch of new heroes that, like, fell out of it or something. I don't know. Yes. It was essentially the every character's continuity is too heavy. Now we need a full reset for the universe.
00:08:51
Speaker
So it's basically like Peter Parker dies and another kid gets bitten by a radioactive spider. Like ah ah Donald Blake dies and another guy finds a staff that turns him into Thor. So it's the same exact thing. just restarting.
00:09:07
Speaker
Doug Mensch, who fucking hated Jim Stupid, came out and told everybody about it in an interview. He was like, look There's this thing Jim Stupid wants to do. It sucks.
00:09:20
Speaker
I hate it. And the comic book fans went nuts. Like, you can't kill Peter Parker. And you can't turn. One of the quotes was like turning um Captain America from Steve Rogers into like a drywall salesman. Like it was something like something very like working class. And everyone's like, you can't do that.
Mattel's Influence on Secret Wars
00:09:39
Speaker
So then Jim Stupid held a press conference just straight up calling Doug Mench a liar.
00:09:46
Speaker
Now, at this press conference, all the fucking Marvel editors – this is ah a bit of a tangent, but all the Marvel editors were sitting behind Jim Stupid, including Tom DeFalco, and just letting him say this, which is what soured Doug mentioned in Marvel Comics for years and years. But Tom DeFalco – fucking later confirmed that this is exactly what happened.
00:10:10
Speaker
<unk> stupid legitimately said all of this stuff. And he was like, well, well it was never confirmed. So like fucking, that's not what Doug men said. He didn't say it was confirmed to definitely happening. He said, this is what Jim stupid wanted to do.
00:10:26
Speaker
Anyway, so this idea was floating around in Marvel's heads about doing a big event involving all the heroes to try and like reinvigorate kids' excitement in the comics.
00:10:40
Speaker
Right. And everyone agreed, with the exception of Jim Stupid, that the Big Bang was a bad idea. yes go be Yeah, so obviously they didn't do it, but...
Financial Struggles and Comic Events
00:10:52
Speaker
Mattel...
00:10:53
Speaker
the toy company whose stiff competition at this time was Kenner, saw Jack Kirby was offered these new gods toys, saw that they were coming out with all these other toys and panicked. They said, we need to get into this. Marvel had already tried to strike a deal with Kenner. Kenner said, no, thanks. So,
00:11:13
Speaker
Mattel swooped in and said, let's make a deal. ah Jim Stupid immediately confirmed this was his his baby. He thought that this was the perfect opportunity to play out his Big Bang Theory in comic form, create a big event that places all the heroes that is just meant to sell toys for the Mattel company. Mattel, at the same time, starts requesting exactly that, a comic series that stars all the heroes and villains that they had licensed out and were about to make toys for. There is a very long story here, but Marvel's parent company was trying to avoid a hostile corporate takeover at the time. They went private and as a result needed money. They so they also started demanding a big flagship comic event to help cover the costs of going private.
00:12:06
Speaker
Mattel... went out and did some market research they were like what is what do kids want to see in their toys and the thing it was the stupidest thing that they discovered was that the two words kids responded to best in advertising were the words secret and the word wars So they demanded that this comic be called Secret Wars.
Toy Demands and New Characters
00:12:37
Speaker
And Jim Stupid was just like, unbelievable. Yeah, absolutely. Sure. Yeah. The other thing that they requested, they were like, we want some new characters so that we can, we want to release toys of characters that nobody's ever seen before. So I'm unsure of which was requested by them and which was ah Jim Stupid's ideas.
00:12:59
Speaker
Right. But just wait till we get to him. yeah the I think the other big pre-sale detail is that Jim Stupid saw this as an opportunity to start integrating the ideas that had for comic book characters that the current writers on those series had already said no to. Right. Including he had, I think it was for $220, bought an idea from a Spider-Man fan.
00:13:28
Speaker
two To put him in a black high tech suit. That is all. That's the whole so idea. Hey, what if he was in a black suit? And he was like, I will pay you for that. Right.
00:13:39
Speaker
And the current writers and artists of Spider-Man had said no to that idea when he brought it up. So yeah, Secret Wars was his opportunity. Right. He had this idea and this would go on for a long time. And we're going to talk about this a lot as we talk about this comic, because to him, this was confirmation of it because ah well we'll jump ahead and say Secret Wars sold very well.
Challenges in Production
00:14:02
Speaker
Oh, when nuts. Yeah. So this was confirmation to him of a prior belief he had, which is that he could write these characters better than any of these dumb writers he had working for him.
00:14:17
Speaker
Right. It gets so during production, you can see parts of this start to sprout up, right? We have Zach doing the pencils originally.
00:14:30
Speaker
Apparently, Jim Stupid would call him over and over again and say, hey, you have to redraw this panel. You have to. This is too much action. What he was really insisting on was establishing
Secret Wars' Commercial Success
00:14:44
Speaker
shots and long horizontal panels so that they could include as many characters as possible.
00:14:49
Speaker
Yes. The idea was just screen time for every character as much as possible, because that's what pushed the toy sales. Well, so so so this was also fucking Jim Stupid's idea was like, oh, this will teach kids. What a comic book should do is to teach kids how to play with the toys. That is the the infamous quote. this is He literally said that this series was to teach children how to play with the toys. Yeah. So having as many as
Control Over Marvel's Direction
00:15:18
Speaker
possible was only going to write increase sales.
00:15:23
Speaker
But so the result of him asking for Zek to redraw it all the time is they fell behind deadline which meant that Bob Layton only by issue four Bob Layton had to come in and to do pencils so that Mike Zek could finish up his work m Bob Layton takes over for four and five Zek comes back for issue six and by that time stupid is sending him stick figure drawings for every panel along with the scripts he's saying unbelievable just fill in the actual drawing here and granted you might be looking at this in uh 2026 and being and and thinking in a post alan moore world
00:16:06
Speaker
you You might be thinking, well, yeah, the writer dictates everything that goes on. This was... The reason that Alan Moore got away with that was because he was trying to do this like visual poetry with his work. And...
00:16:24
Speaker
and After that, yes, the norm became for writers to to be a lot more precious. And it's actually actually bounced back a little bit in recent years with dudes like Tom King and whatnot. But this was before that.
00:16:40
Speaker
So the idea of sending... it would be like doing a line reading for veteran actors as a novice movie director. Right, right. If you were like...
00:16:52
Speaker
but no no no read it like this yes you can't handle the truth like hey christopher walken come over here i have yeah exactly so like you mentioned the series comes out it has every superhero in it it yeah sells issue one sells like crazy to the point that like The comic book shops sold out in their first hour. People were creating these huge mobs, demanding more. This is great for Marvel. It does it doesn't set a great precedent for Marvel. and We'll get into why as the podcast goes
Rejected Ideas Becoming Iconic
00:17:29
Speaker
on. But at this point, Jim Stupid...
00:17:35
Speaker
Sees himself as the expert. I think you you already said this, but he says out loud that he knows each character better than any of the artists. So... Any of the... Yeah. Or writers. Yeah. Just he knows them better than any or yeah staff and you any of the of the Marvel staff. So he starts doing the stick figure panels for...
00:17:57
Speaker
Every artist or he starts asking them to make their comics more like Secret Wars. He is showing them panels of Secret Wars and saying, this is what you should be doing with your story.
00:18:08
Speaker
He ah also just ego fed, started scrapping ideas he disagreed with and rewriting entire issues himself. um he tried to, even though it was his idea or the idea that he bought, he tried to scrap Spider-Man's black suit immediately.
00:18:25
Speaker
Literally the issue after it debuted. Yeah. They were instructed to kill it and they fought against it because the publishing timelines didn't end up lining up. That's the only reason we get the black suit saga out of. Unbelievable. Unbelievable.
00:18:41
Speaker
It's, it's, it's, there's so much in this run that Jim stupid accidentally does. Right. uh, And then tries to sabotage immediately. Black suit Spider-Man is one of those things, but but the reasons that he does it suck, and even the the idea of like a high-tech black suit is not what the writers, the better writers, end up doing with it, where they create the concept of venom and symbiotes.
00:19:07
Speaker
But... Like, that's not the idea he had. a fancy view So the other thing that saves the black suit here is after he tells them to kill it, word gets to Mattel and they're thrilled. They say, we can sell two Spider-Man figures. We can sell a red and blue suit figure and a black suit and a black suit figure. That's doubling our sales.
Maintaining Status Quo
00:19:31
Speaker
Yeah.
00:19:31
Speaker
Do not kill this. Do not kill this new suit. Right, right, right, right. The other one that he... So J.M.D. Mateus had been working on Captain America for a year at this point. He had created this big, long arc where Captain America eventually kills the Red Skull. Like the the last issue, Captain America number 300, he ends up killing the Red Skull, throws his shield into the Hudson River, walks off, and it's supposed to kick off a series where...
00:20:01
Speaker
Captain America is like, I've lived my full life in a war. I've tried being a superhero. It's still all just results in death. I'm just going to be ah a peace activist. And he goes out, he tries to be a peace activist. The government tries to kill him for it. Eventually, I forget his name, but the the second Bucky Barnes ends up killing him.
00:20:23
Speaker
Like, In an attempt to work with the government and be a good Captain America like figure. Captain America dies and he's replaced with a Native American man who becomes the new Captain America. Moving forward, we have a brand new Captain America. This fits right in with Jim Stupid's plan, right, to refresh every comic book character. it's also such a compelling arc to throw him on. I think like yeah was it later in the 80s, they take some notes from that for his Nomad run. His Nomad run, yeah.
00:20:54
Speaker
Jim Stupid sees the issue after it's written and drawn, and he says, this isn't right. Captain America can't throw his shield into the river. he scraps all of J.M. Demetrius' work, rewrites the issue from scratch And publishes this mediocre story where Captain America lives and just keeps being the best.
Secret Wars 2 Announcement
00:21:20
Speaker
Stupid is the only one high on his success here, right? The writers, the artists, the editors, even the parent company's reps yeah meeting with staff agreed that the run was shit, but that because it featured every hero, it sold really well. People were just going to flock to buy it. Yeah. And so...
00:21:40
Speaker
Immediately after issue 12 of Secret Wars debuts, I think before we actually hit 1985, Secret Wars 2 is announced. and Yeah, which is going to be a nightmare of its own that we're not getting into today.
00:21:55
Speaker
When we cover that. Holy shit, people that that. There is a year of, marvel ah sorry, I'm not going get too into it, but there's a year of Marvel Comics where it's not just one series that's unreadable. It is all of Marvel Comics that's unreadable.
00:22:14
Speaker
We're going get so mad. We're going to get so mad. And we're going be talking about it for like nine episodes because it we'll be like, we'll like read three issues in New Mutants and then have to read two that are about Secret Wars. Yeah.
00:22:26
Speaker
And then get so mad. Then we'll read four more issues and then another Secret Wars 2 issue. It's going to suck. Anyway, there's ah there's a fucking issue in Secret Wars 2 where Spider-Man has to teach the Beyonder how to poop.
00:22:41
Speaker
Literally not, I'm not exaggerating. He's like, wheelers man you're going to feel a pressure in your lower bowels.
Upcoming Issues and Fan Reactions
00:22:49
Speaker
We will, we will get too mad to continue recording if we keep thinking about it.
00:22:53
Speaker
Okay. So why don't we breathe for a minute while our piano player comes. Ew.
00:23:07
Speaker
We can listen to the dulcet sounds of his orgasmic playing.
00:23:14
Speaker
listen to him tickle those ivories in all the right spots. All right.
00:23:24
Speaker
And gives it a little kiss at the end. Okay, welcome. Everybody to Pat's email corner. We got a normal sized inbox today, Matt, which is perfect for our purposes. Thank you.
00:23:42
Speaker
ah Starting off with email Michael. Episode 49 responses. Hello, email Michael. He says, hi email i at tell Matt that I think it's great that you've opened the door to such answers as i got a haircut just like Sasquatch shortens his hair to the question of what X-Men related thing you did this week.
00:24:00
Speaker
Now that you've done that, you'll never have trouble answering this again. You could say things like, I ate food, just like Wolverine does sometimes. Or, i experienced weather, the stuff Storm can control with her powers. And it would be just as valid as the haircut story you already got away with. Great idea, Pat. Keep aiming low. i support you. He savaged you there, my friend. I'm usually not smart enough to understand what I'm getting made fun of.
00:24:30
Speaker
So thank you. This is it.
00:24:38
Speaker
I will say, the only thing I'll say in my defense here is that I was getting very Sasquatch-like between my hair and my beard. It was out there and it was time for a trip.
00:24:50
Speaker
We actually had to re... We had we had we scheduled a record and ah we had to reschedule it. And during that first record, you... put your You pushed your hair up and it was the tallest I've ever seen your hair.
00:25:06
Speaker
Oh, really? And then the next day when we recorded was the day you got your hair cut and it was normal. I thought you were going to tell a goofy story. I was going to say there was my beard was so bushy that there wasn't a distance I could be from the mic where my hairs wouldn't be scraping it.
00:25:25
Speaker
And it would still pick me up.
00:25:28
Speaker
He tried. He tried the other side of the room.
00:25:34
Speaker
But he also likes to... Meanwhile! He also likes to groom it so it sticks straight forward. Like a spike. that's And I was like, just push it down. And he's like, no!
00:25:46
Speaker
Email Michael continues. He says, next, you asked us to draw Nemesis based on your description of her as wearing red and black and having a mask like Deadpool and also Spider-Man and a costume that was kind of like Ben Reilly and also Spawn. And also it has wings and also a cape of a and a sword handcuffed to her hand. Yeah, I'm not going to do that.
00:26:04
Speaker
Damn it! Nobody did that? And I'm so... Like, ah we've asked so... We've asked... We've sent... We've done so many asks of our listeners, like, in, like, hey,
Obscure Characters Discussion
00:26:14
Speaker
do this. And everybody does all of them, no matter how ridiculous they are. And the one that I wanted, which is that people draw Nemesis before they look up a picture of Nemesis. That's the only one I've ever actually wanted.
00:26:27
Speaker
Just based on our description in episode 49. And nobody did it! Well... There's still time. I know how you feel because nobody filmed themselves drinking pilk.
00:26:42
Speaker
It's exactly like that. Email Michael closes out. He says, lastly, you challenged us to disprove your taxonomy of superhero teams. However, this cannot be done.
00:26:53
Speaker
Yeah. You also asked for other superhero teams to classify. According to the Marvel Wiki's list, there are 6,681 teams in Marvel Comics and 4,130 in Earth-616 specifically.
00:27:07
Speaker
I'd rather not just pick some at random because a lot seemed pretty uninteresting or short-lived. For example, the Alpha Males are a bunch of clones of a boy named Alpha who appeared in a single issue of Spider-Man in 2012 before being destroyed. Go ahead and classify them, i guess.
00:27:22
Speaker
I'd have to read their comics, but also, man, you're spicy this week, email Michael. he Sorry. he sorry He signed off with, didn't do a lot this week, email Michael.
00:27:36
Speaker
ah he's gotten He's gotten real spicy. He's gotten comfortable in our living room, and he's kicked off his shoes, and he's rubbing his feet on our pillows. And his feet up.
00:27:49
Speaker
Yeah. Listen, it's allowed. It's just it's not polite. It's not polite. I'm not going to kick you out of the house. Up next, Matt, another returning regular saying you're never going to believe this. It's Ambitious Eric. Oh.
00:28:05
Speaker
Wait, I'm never going to believe that our regular email emailed in. No, no, no, no, no. you know You're never going to believe this is the title of the email. Oh, okay. This sounds exciting. Hey, Path, you tell Matrick I said, good evening. He'll know what it means.
00:28:23
Speaker
ah We're not starting off strong here. This all right. Well, that's why he's ambitious is sometimes he just takes big swings for the fences. True. I love how Mikey Two Male suggested you cover a DC hero nobody ever heard of for April Fool's. And he specifically names Ragman, who is one of my favorite characters from the distinguished competition. I never realized how much I was that guy about obscure comic book characters until I started listening to your podcast. yeah I think there's a thing of Ragman is one of those ones where i like, yeah, he seems like he looks cool.
00:29:00
Speaker
And there's something cool about liking him because he looks cool and there's he's so obscure. But it's I don't know. Maybe you guys can tell us. Is there a good Ragman story?
00:29:16
Speaker
I don't know who this guy is. I'm going to go ahead and say there's probably not. But this is the thing. there's Sometimes there's these characters like Nemesis. Looks awesome. I want to be a big Nemesis fan. There's no good Nemesis stories, unfortunately. Yeah,
00:29:32
Speaker
The wrong time to debut a cool character. It's not like Wildcat, who's cool because he's super obscure, than Geoff Johns wrote. Before Geoff Johns got so bad and then kind of racist, he wrote ah ah oh right a bunch of good JSA comics with him in it.
00:29:50
Speaker
Ambitious Eric goes on, he says, it's rare I get the chance to out-pedant Matt. So I'm excited to inform him there's only one R in sure bet.
00:30:01
Speaker
Is that true? Sherbet? Yes. Is it one of those things where like the, the if it's made in France or whatever, it's Sherbet. If you get the cheap local version, it's Sherbert. No. What?
00:30:15
Speaker
Oh, well, okay. By the late 18th century, Sherbet had become the established spelling, but after only a few intermittent uses in the 18th and 19th centuries, this is from Merriam-Webster, folks, Sherbert staged a minor comeback in the 20th century.
00:30:31
Speaker
It's now a fully established, though far lesser used, variant. Also, when Sherbert began to exist in the 17th century, so we're talking fucking 1600s, folks.
00:30:45
Speaker
There were two ways to spell it. Sherbet and Sherbert. Old English New English. yeah what a Look, he's right, but... He should also stand corrected.
00:31:00
Speaker
Exactly. All right. Thank you, Ambitious Eric. Up next, Mikey Two Mails sends us his traditional two mails. Oh.
00:31:11
Speaker
Mikey Two Mails says, I was thinking earlier, what would be the worst superhero team to try and team up with the X-Men? I think that there would be some downright disastrous combinations with how many superheroes there are.
00:31:22
Speaker
What do you think would be the worst team up? Mikey Two Mails. I mean, i oh man, oh this is this is tough. I think... So the X-Men function as like a found family. Like that's the biggest thing about X-Men stories. You found family stories and about and like a coming of age, like growing up and becoming your best version of yourself stories. So what's something that like really scrapes up against that in a way that's not fun?
00:31:52
Speaker
The Punisher. yeah ah But a team. But a team. A team. team Okay. i um Maybe like... Okay, something like... And I'm sure this team up happens. But something like the New Warriors.
Speculations on Team-Ups
00:32:10
Speaker
Who are just about treading water.
00:32:16
Speaker
Right? Like... The New Warriors yeah are about treading water and trying to sell some books. Yeah. Before they can spin off into their solo series. There's no growth that happens in the new warriors or same with the defenders, right? dollar bill era of the defenders. I was going to say, yeah, yeah.
00:32:34
Speaker
Yeah. Um, what do you, what do you have to any sort of ideas? I'm really, yeah I think the punisher would be a terrible team up with the expert. That would be an awful issue.
00:32:46
Speaker
I know they're not once again I gotta say the Punisher's not team but I do that was the immediate thing that popped into my head because they would just be horrified and then stop him it would be very fast what about a very cynical team like the authority like Warren Ellis is the authority That might be good that might be a bad, right? Like, to have them cracking wise and being all weathered and worldly and have the X-Men kind of just being like, what's your problem, guys?
00:33:19
Speaker
I don't like these guys. Man, I don't like these guys. Yeah, yeah. Like, bringing out the worst characteristics of guys like Wolverine or...
00:33:30
Speaker
um even even like Even like Kitty Pryde and been scraping up against Professor X and Cyclops and Colossus and Nightcrawler in a way that's like is' like not fun.
00:33:46
Speaker
You know who what i think would be terrible with the X-Men? Who's that? The Micronauts. i Mikey Two Males...
00:33:57
Speaker
has a second email, his non X-Men related email. If you recall, he always sends us two emails. Oh, I guess he has every time, huh? Yeah. Yeah.
00:34:08
Speaker
And he just happens to be named Mikey two males. going to have to scrub back through old episodes. like There's gotta be some times he didn't do that. I don't think we noticed before.
00:34:19
Speaker
Anyway, He says, hi Pat. Tell man I have some awesome news to share. i got that job at the science museum, so I will become a science um educator once again. Legitimately that fucking rules, dude. Congratulations. That's so cool.
00:34:35
Speaker
Mikey Two Mails. Mikey Two Mails. Give him a little shout out. I will be bringing cool science to the public again and do cool stuff. Thought I would share. Thank you, Mikey Two Mails, for sharing. We're very happy for you.
00:34:48
Speaker
and Okay, I was hoping that would be a more celebratory sound. Oh, this one. Let's go, bub. Yeah, man, that rules. I'm so happy for you. I'm so happy that you'll be able to afford but to join at a higher tier of the Mutant Menace Patreon.
Recap of Pre-Secret Wars Events
00:35:08
Speaker
No, I'm kidding. i'm I know I'm really, really happy that that rolls. And um congrats. and send us privately what museum. And if we ever end up in the area, we'll come ah check it out. One more email for us, Matt.
00:35:22
Speaker
Okay. And this one I'll be honest, was sent to us more than a month ago. All right. Well, then let's move on. No, no, no. This is important. Let me point to the piano. No, no, no. Cut it off. Okay. All right. All right. All right. right ah Weapon Jason, as soon as we released a reading order on...
00:35:43
Speaker
our Patreon was kind enough to write up just a brief recap of what all of our favorite heroes are doing immediately before Secret Wars. Oh, cool!
00:35:54
Speaker
Since we don't follow them. Yeah, I'm not following Marvel superheroes. He says, I suspect you'll detect a common thread here. Let's start with Spider-Man. He has three different series right now. Amazing, Peter Parker Spectacular, and Marvel Team-Up. So he's pretty busy. Remember when they were supposed to do a fourth? Yes. I think it was Demetrius who said no.
00:36:18
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. Please just do another X title.
00:36:23
Speaker
i But he boils it down pretty good here. Spider-Man and Black Cat are exploring a relationship while Spider-Man is battling Hobgoblin and working with Black Widow to take down some unrelated gang thugs. This all ends up with Hobgoblin possibly dead. Nobody, though. J. Jonah Jameson turning editorial over to Joe Robertson.
00:36:42
Speaker
Robbie Robertson, you may know him as. His name is Joe? Joe? Yeah, yeah. It's like Joseph Robbie Robertson? His middle name isn't Robbie. it's They just call him Robbie because his last name is Robertson. I never knew that.
00:36:56
Speaker
Yeah. And Black Cat getting superpowers and potentially becoming Kingpin's new assassin. Were superpowers like luck powers? I think so, yeah. I'm pretty sure this is, it's like in a deal with Kingpin, she gets them, and then sometimes they're present, sometimes they're not. Depends if the writer remembers. says Exactly. Yeah. ah Peter has dinner with Harry Osborn, but on leaving the restaurant, his Spidey sense, which has been long dormant, reactivates with the cosmic threat levels. As Spider-Man, he investigates the cause, a mysterious building in Central Park, and poof, he disappears into Secret Wars.
00:37:30
Speaker
Oh, okay. Over in Iron Man, James Rhodes is wearing the Iron Man armor and battling problematic Mandarin. It's James Rhodes' his Iron Man, which we eventually find out in, I think, issue 10. Yeah, I mean, it's it's implied earlier than that, but also, can can do you know, how how familiar are you with James Rhodes?
00:37:49
Speaker
Not super. I know who he is and, like, his his the fundamentals. Right. in this In this comic, he speaks in, like, like somewhat jive.
00:38:03
Speaker
Not like constant jive, but he just like gets go die dips into jive. And he's always horny. And I'm wondering if that's Jim Stupid's racism or if that's all of Marvel Comics' racism.
00:38:17
Speaker
ah Right, if it's happening in the current storyline as well. Yeah, yeah. The Man story. Yeah. Rhodes is full of doubts and imposter syndrome about being Iron Man, but rallies to stop the Mandarin's grand scheme by destroying his lair.
00:38:30
Speaker
Returning to New York, Rhodes' coworker Morley alerts him to a weird energy in Central Park as Iron Man Rhodes goes to investigate, finds a mysterious building in Central Park, and poof, he disappears into Secret Wars.
00:38:42
Speaker
Oh, okay. In The Incredible Hulk... Bruce Banner is trying to cure mammalian cancer using gamma rays, which appear to work even if it does turn the test dog green. Of course, this just means aging crime lord Max Stryker has hired D-list villain Boomerang, not the not that one, the Marvel one, to kidnap Bruce's girlfriend so he can extort Bruce into using the treatment to cure Stryker. The treatment works, though Stryker is green now and Hulk is told where to find kidnapped Kate in New York. The Hulk heads to New York where he is distracted by a mysterious building in Central Park and poof, is sucked into Secret Wars.
00:39:13
Speaker
It's Captain Boomerang in DC. Boomerang. Yeah, I know. But it's the it's the same guy. Meanwhile, the thing is in Central Park with Alicia Masters doing that thing he likes to do, which is lament that he is the thing.
00:39:28
Speaker
You'd think this would lead him to being distracted by a mysterious building in Central Park, especially if you've been reading Marvel two and one where he has a tradition of disappearing on Alicia Masters. But you'd be wrong. Instead, he and Alicia go to the Baxter building so Thing can flash back to the Fantastic Four's origin story and he can collect Mr. Fantastic and Human Torch to investigate reports of a mysterious building in Central Park.
00:39:50
Speaker
The trio investigate and poof, they disappear into Secret Wars. okay Why isn't Sue Storm with them? She's pregnant. So didn't go with them to investigate initially, but does show up too late and wonders at their disappearance with the rest of the Avengers as we learn over in Fantastic Four. Of note, this is when the Trapster, a.k.a. Paste Pot Pete, gets taken out by the Baxter Building front desk secretary robot to his everlasting shape.
00:40:14
Speaker
Thor is in the heart of the amazing and must-read Walter Simonson run involving epic stakes, major character changes, and mind-blowingly good art. His alter ego of Donald Blake is no more, and Loki has plots in motion.
00:40:27
Speaker
But no time for that. Instead, he walks into the Avengers Mansion, ends up lured into Central Park with the rest of the team to investigate a mysterious building and poof, gets sucked into Secret Wars. Oh. Captain America and Nomad are busy battling problematic indigenous stereotype Black Crow. This is the the man that would have eventually become Captain America. Okay, but he's a villain for now.
00:40:50
Speaker
Culminating in a battle on Brooklyn Bridge in a magical snowstorm that ends when Cap gives up. Captain America then joins up with the Avengers and ends up investigating a mysterious building in Central Park and poof, gets sucked into Secret Wars.
00:41:02
Speaker
Huh. That's interesting. the Avengers are having a party. They're celebrating Hawkeye and Mockingbird's marriage from Hawkeye's recent limited series. Then they're celebrating the return of Thor. Then it's the return of Vision to corporeal form after his synthesoid coma.
00:41:20
Speaker
Vision immediately cools off the celebrations by insisting he and Scarlet Witch need to be members, violating the member limit because she's detected massive electromagnetic disruptions nearby. This eventually leads all of the avengers heading out to central park to investigate a mysterious building source of the disruptions' vision detected sheha captain america wasp captain marvel moniica rambow edition thor and hawkeye go poof and are sucked into secret wars Okay.
00:41:47
Speaker
Thank you, Weapon Jason. That is a... Very comprehensive. Tight tight and comprehensive recap. Appreciate the yeah the work you put in there. And now everyone knows. So that is what every that is what's happening in all of the Marvel Universe as we head in.
Personal Anecdotes and Humor
00:42:04
Speaker
Secret. Secret.
00:42:14
Speaker
Wars. war But before that, Pat, we've talked about the comics. We've talked about emails. I want to talk about you for just a second, Pat. Yeah, yeah.
00:42:26
Speaker
Did you do anything secret this week? Matt, I'm going to say no. Sometimes it's okay to just say no to this question. Oh.
00:42:36
Speaker
Matt, okay did you do anything secret this week? I alone and I'm single. Everything I do is secret.
00:42:47
Speaker
Literally, every it doesn't matter how mundane, nobody knows about anything I do ever. Tell us the secret, Matt. um Okay, the other night I made ah but i made cookies and soup I've been having some insomnia, so I made them late at night. like It started at 10 p.m. or something. Cookie soup.
00:43:09
Speaker
No, I didn't make cookie
Heroes Assembled in Secret Wars
00:43:11
Speaker
soup. I made cookies. it's And they were both bad. i I think I used a little too little sugar in the cookies, so they were a little bland. Oh, more of a biscuit.
00:43:24
Speaker
And I forgot the flour. Huh. Ah!
00:43:32
Speaker
It was mostly just eggs. I just made eggs. I made sweet eggs.
00:43:40
Speaker
Vanilla eggs. I made sweet vanilla eggs.
00:43:45
Speaker
They were really scrambled, though. And they'd bake it back. So they foamed up. got a good rise. Okay.
00:43:56
Speaker
but And I forgot salt. So no salt, no sugar. it was very They tasted very flowery, very bland. the ah soup that I made, i was just kind of like throwing together ingredients that I had that were all old. Like I had potatoes that were getting too old. I had broccoli getting too old. i had milk getting too old. old I had yeah yeah um vegetable bouillon that was getting too old.
00:44:23
Speaker
So I threw it all together. Without like looking up any kind of recipe. Oh, yeah and and basil and thyme. Okay, Without any recipe. And it was like... seasonally No, I mean... that because It was also bland because like i didn't i didn't see i didn't like...
00:44:46
Speaker
I put in the spices later. I didn't start with just like oh boiling some spices at the bottom of the pant pot. ah bla So I had a bland soup and bland cookies, um both made with aging ingredients.
00:45:03
Speaker
Okay. secret, all right. Don't tell anyone. Shh. Shh. Shh. Literally everything I do is a secret. Nobody knows. I could fall over dead. How many days would it take for you for you to know I was dead? You would wait like three, four days of not hearing from me.
00:45:23
Speaker
Well, I'm getting really sad thinking about this
00:45:27
Speaker
Well, then let's do something that's happy, like talk about our least favorite comic book series, Secret Wars by a Jim Stupid and
Tensions Among Heroes
00:45:35
Speaker
Mike Zack. Oh, all right. ah Let's start, Matt.
00:45:40
Speaker
Call me crazy. With issue number one, The War Begins. I don't get it. A huge group of Marvel superheroes are suddenly on some weird space platform. The group...
00:45:54
Speaker
Captain America, Captain Marvel, Iron Man, Hawkeye, Wasp, Thor, She-Hulk, Hulk, Spider-Man, Thing, Mr. Fantastic, Human Torch, Professor X, Wolverine, Rogue, Storm, Cyclops, Nightcrawler, Colossus, and Lockheed.
00:46:07
Speaker
I cannot wait to see how Lockheed interacts with all these other heroes. I... He can't hear. Fucking also, Professor X is in a damn wheelchair.
00:46:21
Speaker
Yeah, he ah he forgot how to walk again. up Wait a minute. yeah Cyclops isn't in the X-Men, and he wasn't with them when they found that big cairn in ah was Central Park.
00:46:38
Speaker
Yeah, you're absolutely right, Madden. On another platform is a huge group of Marvel villains. Enchantress, Ultron, Absorbing Man, Wrecker, Thunderball, Piledriver, Bulldozer, Kang, Dr. Octopus, Lizard, Molecule Man, Dr. Doom, and Galactus. Who? Matt.
00:46:57
Speaker
The Wrecking Crew is here. Yeah, you've got look it's you've got a goddess, a robot made of adamantium that almost killed the Avengers. You have a man that can turn himself into any material.
00:47:13
Speaker
Just by touching it. You have Kang, a Time Lord, warlord, a man who is from the far future and is a brilliant scientist in the far future. Dr. Octopus, fine. What I'm complaining about is the wrecking crew.
00:47:33
Speaker
is a team that you throw at a hero to give them an early win a story. Like, they these are not... These are just guys that found an enchanted crowbar.
00:47:46
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Among lackest. Well, also there's the lizard who's just a lizard. Yeah, that's true. but But Jim Stupid makes an interesting choice with him that I actually kind of like. So let's...
00:47:59
Speaker
Okay. ah The heroes also notice that Magneto was placed on their side and everyone is like, what the fuck? What? Anyway, they watch a galaxy blow up and pieces reform to make a weird piecemeal world. Some almighty being they call the Beyonder places them on it and tells them to kill each other and their wishes will come true. Now, I didn't realize that here the...
00:48:28
Speaker
beyonder destroyed every star in the world in the universe did you realize that was it the whole universe or just the galaxy i don't know later when molecule man reignites all the stars spoiler alert well it the that's maybe too fine of a detail to have made the recap anyway they're like i thought beyonder destroyed all the stars and he's like yep i put him back I didn't.
00:48:54
Speaker
What? I didn't even. so I didn't even clock this. Yeah. We're already getting confused. We're in the establishing shots here. We're getting we're getting a little lost because the heroes do spend the rest of the series. Well, not the whole series, but up until about issue eight talking about how this is a battle for the fate of the universe. Yeah.
00:49:16
Speaker
And we're supposed to glean that from this. But all we really see is the Beyonder forming a world. Yeah. He turns the lights out on a galaxy and we're also supposed to glean that like Detroit is here.
00:49:31
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, it's it's far away. we're We're in far away space, but there are at least two pieces of Earth. I guess so. All right.
00:49:42
Speaker
Ultron tries to kill everyone and Galactus snuffs him out. He goes right for Galactus. Yeah. I am Ultron. I do not understand. I am Ultron. I kill. i kill all. I am Ultron. Like, that's literally the fucking dialogue here. he is like this. do None of this computes. I will kill. i kill all things. i ill but I am. He says, I am Ultron like seven times. ah Dr. Doom tries to convince all the villains not to fight, but instead try to understand the Beyonder.
00:50:17
Speaker
But they all call him a wimp, so he flies off to find Reed Richards. You guys are mean to Doom. Only Reed understands me.
00:50:29
Speaker
Doom goes home. ah But then Kang blasts him out of the sky. oh The heroes, meanwhile, are arguing about Magneto.
00:50:42
Speaker
How can he be a hero when he's a full-on murderer? The X-Men stick up for him, which turns the heroes against them briefly until Magneto decides that this isn't worth spilling mutant blood over. So he leaves.
00:50:55
Speaker
Mention of the submarine attack. Mention of the submarine attack. That's right. That's the murder they're referring Because I was thinking back, I was like, how many people has he actually killed? Yeah. And he sunk the submarine. But in his defense, that was a nuclear submarine. warship that was coming at him to kill him.
00:51:13
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. uh hawkeye has a very strong opinion on this which checks that with his character that's that tracks but yeah he is standing toe-to-toe to cyclops and being like what are you gonna do about it one eye cyclops would wreck cyclops would fucking bury you dude but not you he doesn't even have to use his powers to bury you And look, I have a lot of respect for Hawkeye. He's pulled off some incredible feats. He's got that one incredible Matt Fraction run, right?
Chaotic Battles and Alliances
00:51:47
Speaker
there's yeah There's a lot of good to be found in Hawkeye, but...
00:51:52
Speaker
Step down, man. yeah or this this Without using his optic blasts, he would beat the shit out of you. Yes, he would body you instantly. And I hear you, yes. It's very in his character to challenge anybody. Cyclops will go. Cyclops will...
00:52:11
Speaker
He's got a short fuse. Yeah, he'll throw down. He'll throw down. If he feels... All ah all it took was for Hawkeye to say one... If he had gotten just 1% more racist, Cyclops would have, like, put his face in the dirt.
00:52:27
Speaker
Yeah. Okay. why if he was written by anybody else, he would have beaten the fuck out of Hawkeye. Right.
00:52:37
Speaker
Then... This all kind of calms down when Magneto flies away. So instead, they debate over who will lead them. And they choose Captain America.
00:52:49
Speaker
Yeah, of course. Jim Stupid loves Captain America. will not. So it was to the point, and it starts here. it goes through the entire run. it was to the point where I thought we were going to get, like, ah a turn where Captain America turned out to be a villain in disguise this whole time. Because everybody is just like...
00:53:10
Speaker
the entire run is saying Captain America is so great. We can always rely on him. he will never let us down. He always holds stead. Like it feels like they're trying to foreshadow, not subtly, that he's going to be evil in this.
00:53:26
Speaker
um Wolverine. I think Jim Stupid hates Wolverine because he go he has Wolverine talking like he's from the 1970s. Like, he has not read a fucking X-Men comic since the 1970s. And Wolverine says...
00:53:41
Speaker
and woverine say yeah yeah Captain America is the least of him. I won't follow him. Fucking bullshit. But it's also it's a it's a terrible rendering of Wolverine. i I don't know for any of this art. You can't tell where to blame Mike Zeck or Bob Layton or Jim Stupid. Right. It's just one of them had.
00:54:07
Speaker
is There was so much back and forth and tearing at the fabric that this could be anybody's fault. But we see Wolverine with like a tiny head. His claws are, they look like little thumbtacks. It's like they're small, they're thin. They look like Arya's sword on the Game of Thrones show. He's got a giant chin and his neck is as thick of his as his head. He looks like... All right, for our real big nerds here, he looks like the roach in... In fact, he looks like the wolver roach in Dave Simms' Cerebus.
00:54:45
Speaker
But for our less nerds out here, he looks like um the crimson chin from fucking The Fairly Oddparents. Sure, yeah, yeah.
00:54:56
Speaker
Then... The heroes see Doom's little hover scooter go down, so they check it out. But when Doom sees that everyone pities him, he gets mad and runs off again. so There's no reason. He's looking for the good guys, and he finds them, but he's half dead. So they're like, are you okay, dude? He's like, fuck you. No poo poo peo ah one understands Doom.
00:55:25
Speaker
Um, fucking, yeah. Who is this guy? I think there's a really good, i think later in this series, there's some really good characterizations of doom, but yeah.
00:55:38
Speaker
Yes. Not here. No, here he is just whining all the time. He's got some grand idea that he won't tell us and he won't tell anyone else. And he's just whining. Yeah. Anyway.
00:55:53
Speaker
Immediately after that, the villains all attack the heroes. All right. There goes that. There was our first issue of Secret Wars. um At some point, Kurt Rupert.
00:56:05
Speaker
Oh, yeah. Kurt Rupert. Kurt says, Ach nein, sein. Sein isn't a German word. Ach nein, sein is not a German phrase.
00:56:19
Speaker
Zein is close to a lot of certain German words. Kurt is not German? Or he's just making up words? Yeah, maybe he's just been making them up this whole time. He's not actually German.
00:56:34
Speaker
So Ach is just an exclamation. Oh, yeah. Nine. Nine is nine no. Zein is close to like Zeit. Zeit.
00:56:45
Speaker
But even if he said Zeit, he would be, oh, no time! Zoik, which is thing? Oh, no thing! oh no thing! Oh, nothing!
00:56:56
Speaker
Oh, nothing! Oh, nothing! It's just, Jim Stupid was like, I don't want to i don't want to look up German, what am I, a friggin'... And then he said the the word the The racist word for Germans that started in um World War II that's about a type of ca cabbage.
00:57:13
Speaker
He said that? He said that. Yeesh. He said, I'm not a frickin'. And then he said that. And then everybody said, yeesh. Number two, prisoners of war. All the good guys fight all the bad guys. Which is, man, I keep pitching this comic to every comic book. company and they keep saying no I don't think there's a there there so all the good guys all bad guys minus Doom, Magneto and Galactus the good guys are caught off guard most of the the immediately the X-Men all like
00:57:52
Speaker
every Except for Cyclops and Wolverine. There's like, we don't even see anything. We don't see them in action. They're just on the ground. They got hit by the attack at the end of the last issue that we didn't really get to see. Including Rogue. Rogue!
00:58:08
Speaker
And Colossus. what What could have hit them? that Right. that's The strong... yeah ah The good guys are caught off guard.
00:58:21
Speaker
Most of the X-Men have fallen. Things look bleak until they don't. The good guys rally and send the bad guys running, keeping Enchantress as a prisoner after She-Hulk knocks her out. I think also the wrecking crew they have as prisoners. but Oh, also, not only that do the X-Men dirty in this one way, also fucking Lockheed is missing.
00:58:42
Speaker
And they say, Wolverine says, forget the dragon. would never say that. Right. We're just leaving an X-Man behind. he isary to say He just he this motherfucker does not understand Wolverine even a little bit. Again, it's like he read the first four issues of the newer like the the Claremont X-Men and then never read anymore. He's like, ah I get it
00:59:14
Speaker
Yeah, this guy's cranky. I get it, mean guy. Okay, fine, whatever. Meanwhile, Doctor Doom flies through the sky, lonely and mad about everything that happened in issue one. He arrives at the unconscious body of Galactus, hoping to make him an ally.
00:59:31
Speaker
Now, there is some cool shit about, like, doom approaching an unconscious giant Galactus body. they're Sure. There's some, like playing with action figures, there's some cool moments.
00:59:46
Speaker
um And cool visuals.
00:59:50
Speaker
There are some cool moments when I play with my action figures. Galactus wakes up but ignores Doom completely. Just fucking walks away. Searching for another path to power, he returns to the empty bad guy lair to find the neutralized body of Ultron.
01:00:07
Speaker
The good guys, they find forward of their own. They gather on the four hundred and fifty first floor. not sure why i don't But it's huge. it's just It's to let us know that it's a big complex. It also, it cannot be. like Based on the just like the size of the heroes and the size of the complex, there's no way it's 451 fucking floors. You know how many floors those are? The fucking sense of scale in this story, if I get started on, is going to drive me insane.
01:00:39
Speaker
So they're discussing battle plans. They take turns keeping watch and scouting the planet before going back out for another fight. There's some nice chats. Okay, there's some nice chats between the heroes. Okay, let's talk about some shit that happens here.
01:00:53
Speaker
First of all, Professor X walking again. Right. he' He gives credit to the planet's mysterious energies. Oh, it's like the Beyonder fixed little things that were wrong or missing. Fuck you! You just fucking forgot! that What a convenient fucking...
01:01:11
Speaker
Right. Clearly between issue one and issue two, somebody was like, hey, Jim, you know that ah that a Xavier can walk now, right? No, he can't. know. I read ah issues and and he's walking in either
01:01:31
Speaker
have you read the the the new mutants what's that well The wasp confides in She-Hulk, letting her know she misses Earth. She-Hulk comforts the wasp, letting her know she misses Earth.
01:01:45
Speaker
Cyclops discusses with Reed how much he misses his wife, while Reed discusses with Scott how much he misses his wife. I actually thought this this conversation between the two of them was kind of cute.
01:01:59
Speaker
it was It was sweet, but it is just the two of them. commiserating about missing their wives and Ben Grimm is eavesdropping without them knowing and gets mad about it. He's like, well, I'm lonely. i don't want to hear about them talking about their wives. Now I'm thinking about my girlfriend. And he storms off cursing their names. Right. Like they were nowhere dropping on them. Yeah. You did this, man. You did this to yourself.
01:02:29
Speaker
Spider-Man and John Johnny storm agree that this is a strange place. So three very pointless conversations. Everyone agrees with each other.
Epic Moments and New Villains
01:02:40
Speaker
Meanwhile, the bad guys return to their lair to find Doom in charge, having rebuilt Ultron to serve him. They all apologize to Doom and agree to serve him. Magneto finds his own lair, then breaks into the good guy fortress to create a distraction.
01:02:55
Speaker
All the while, Galactus takes Perch atop a mountain and waits. Suddenly, in the Good Guy Fortress, Spider-Man senses danger. All the heroes rush in to find Magneto, wanting to talk to them, but they attack instead. So he destroys their generator and runs off. There's a really good moment where Spider-Man goes in first, the rest of the heroes go to investigate, and Spider-Man is thrown out in a ball of metal wrapped around him going, Wahoo-hoo! It's Magneto! It's
01:03:28
Speaker
very funny. there's There's a little more like anti-mutant prejudice here. they are they like People are saying like legitimately fucked up shit about mutants.
01:03:41
Speaker
Yes. um But... Mostly Hawkeye. This guy... Yeah. Hawkeye, Human Torch. Those are like the kind of the two leaders of the racist contingent. Right. Human Torch doesn't remember that he helped the X-Men all the way back in like...
01:03:59
Speaker
X-Men number 12 or whatever. If he did remember, that would be probably more of a reason for them to hate him to hate them. Like, they've erased my memory! That's true. The Wasp and the Thing, they chase after Magneto, but Magneto kidnaps the Wasp and gets away, while the Thing transforms back into Ben Grimm and just in his little undies. No time to rescue her now, though. Something's happening with Galactus.
01:04:25
Speaker
What? Something's happening with Galactus! They won't tell us what. I will say, yeah the idea of Galactus just perching up on a mountain, standing there and waiting is chilling. like That was like, shit, this is very cool.
01:04:43
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, yeah, there's a lot of Galactus just standing around. I think he stands around. How long does he stand around for six issues? Is it like issue so eight or nine that he stops standing around?
01:04:54
Speaker
ah Sort of. he all He starts taking some action, I think. either in the next issue or the one after that. But one thing before we move on the dialogue through this entire thing is getting so frustrating.
01:05:07
Speaker
Right. is. i we're We're not doing it justice because we take some pride in our recap writing, but yeah they're just they're just talking about They're telling each other why they're great or what their exact plans and intentions are, or just taking time to explain their powers to be like, oh, well, actually i can yeah stick to walls. Yeah.
01:05:32
Speaker
Or if you're James Rhodes Iron Man, you're just looking at women and being like, ooh, look at the legs on her. Yes. the he said He's a leg man for sure. Apparently. All right. All right. All alright right. i Let's keep moving, Matt. we We've made it to number three.
01:05:52
Speaker
Tempest Without, Crisis Within. yeah. Magneto is chilling in his new base while a really crazy storm rages outside. He immediately makes himself a lair. I love this. this is We know he's got dozens back on Earth that he's just making. This guy loves lairs!
01:06:12
Speaker
He frees Wasp and asks her to talk to him for a bit. Most of the heroes are working to try and fix the generator Magneto destroyed, and they see that Galactus is still just standing there, and the villain lair is glowing with some weird aura.
01:06:27
Speaker
Spider-Man overhears the X-Men talking about abandoning the hero fortress to go join Magneto. So he attacks them. what What? And he says, I'm going to rat on you.
01:06:43
Speaker
it, Spider-Man. Wolverine keeps trying to explain, but Spidey won't stop fighting. And then he runs away to tell the other heroes. But Professor X wipes his mind. Spider-Man runs up to, I think it's Reed Richards and is like, Reed, Reed. And Reed is like, what? And Spider-Man's like, uh, I don't know.
01:07:07
Speaker
And Cyclops is standing behind him. me He's like, I wonder what that was all about. Pretty weird. Spider-Man. And fucking, Oh, Jim Shooter can write everyone's characters better than they can.
01:07:21
Speaker
This is exactly what the Spider-Man I know is like. So then the X-Men just take off in some ship to find Magneto. Jesus Christ. They find a ship. It's not a pretty one. It's super ugly.
01:07:34
Speaker
Yeah. Dr. Doom reaches out to make an alliance with Magneto, but he turns Doom down. Then he and the Wasp make out.
01:07:45
Speaker
There's some... We don't need to dig into it, but there are some consent issues here with that case. is Yeah. There are... Well, she... So there's, like, she says no, and then she goes into, like...
01:08:00
Speaker
You have the beautiful most beautiful eyes I've ever seen. ah she knew and then She says no five times. Yes. And then he just doesn't stop. So eventually she's like, oh, all right. He's cute. Yeah. And then she's like, your eyes are really nice. And then she says yes. um but like that's not That's not the way to kiss someone if anyone's unclear. Yeah. Yeah. If somebody says no, you just don't do it. um But yeah.
01:08:26
Speaker
Dr. Doom takes two human women he found somewhere and puts them in a machine turns them into supervillains. He's just got two women.
01:08:36
Speaker
I found two women. They will kind of justify this later on, but it's it's again, just clear that Jim Stupid never asked to this question, where did these women come from? Yeah. There's nobody else on this planet for all we know. He's like, nobody, no, ah what people aren't going to care about this.
01:08:57
Speaker
I don't know why I'm doing like the old, Jim, Jim Stupid actually probably had like a Mara voice that sounded like ours. I don't know why people aren't going to care about this. Yeah, but high pitched. I don't, I don't know why people are going to care about this. Care about this. I don't know why people are going to care about this. I'm getting But he, yeah, fucking, it's just Mattel was like, we need more female toys. um I bet.
01:09:21
Speaker
I bet. Yes. So he creates Vulcana and Titania. who are entirely like this. This was Mattel saying, hey, we need more female characters. Can you please please create three more female characters?
01:09:39
Speaker
Oh, wait, it's that it like literally it was that. OK, yes, it was. It was that direct. And so he he has two of them just appear here. Doctor Doom takes them and puts them in a machine, turns them into Volcana, who is super hot and creates lava.
01:09:57
Speaker
And Titania, who is super strong, like really super strong. Okay. Vulcana immediately makes friends with molecule man who is trying to stop using his powers on his therapist's advice. Kind of a cute consent. I, I, I like molecule man in this story.
01:10:14
Speaker
I do like molecule man. He also, he plays a huge part in the 2015 secret wars too, which is like a, a very nice shout out to this one, even though that one acknowledges that this one is very bad. He plays a role in the, uh, in secret wars too. Also,
01:10:31
Speaker
And it sucks. My goodness. He's everywhere. he's ah He's like a character that's been in three stories and they're Marvel Comics' three most pivotal stories.
01:10:45
Speaker
Thor frees Enchantress and they go through some portal to talk. All right. When the storm breaks, the villains catch the heroes off guard again. They get their asses totally kicked, so Captain America calls on everyone to retreat.
01:11:01
Speaker
The wrecking crew gets freed, and Doom says he's going to destroy the entire hero base. Oh, boy. So, at okay, if this is supposed to be an introduction to all the Marvel heroes,
01:11:18
Speaker
almost every piece of dialogue is literally them just saying, like, I don't want to be here. I wish I wasn't a hero. yeah Great introduction, stupid. Great, great way to introduce kids to these cool superheroes is a bunch of them all being like, well, with great power comes. I want to go the fuck home.
01:11:40
Speaker
They also, they get caught off guard here because they just kind of forget they're supposed to be on lookout duty. Yeah. They are also so stupid. Do they not have any defenses set up? This is ridiculous. And we cut to Hulk, who's like falling asleep because he forgot he was supposed to stop the bad guys. Great one, Jim.
01:12:00
Speaker
Jim, you're doing it. You did it. these with One more detail that drives me nuts here. Doc Ock. knocks out captain marvel i know his arms are strong i know like he's got a lot of power in there but captain marvel is cosmically strong is she gonna get bonked on the head and just go down yeah i mean he does the same thing later to she hulk so i mean that's true it's g jim just doesn't have any concept of also um iron man has roller skates oh yeah just pop out his little feet just like good for him yeah that's that rules man that's fun owen reese this is this is issue for situation hopeless ah owen reese the molecule man blows up the good guy fortress with barely an effort which volcana finds very very sexy as she does
01:13:00
Speaker
But it turns out the good guys escaped, so Owen, trying to impress Volcana, picks up a mountain and drops the whole mountain on their fucking heads. ah Thor, meanwhile, is having a picnic with the Enchantress.
01:13:17
Speaker
They consider making out, but are interrupted by an earthquake that could only have been bad guy activity. God. Dastardly.
01:13:31
Speaker
They return to the good guy fortress only to find they're surrounded by bad guys and rubble. Thor beats all of them up until Ultron vaporizes him with his new disintegrator beam, leaving only his cape and hat behind. But as Doom turns Ultron's disintegrator ray on Kang for betraying him, we see Thor is actually watching in tattered clothing from a distance. i wish We also got to say, first of all,
01:14:00
Speaker
this is a bob layton pencils issue yes um second of all they drop a mountain on them they drop a whole mess so on the wait actually i'll get that get to that later oh yeah there's not how do you uh yeah stop that i I guess they're all dead. And every all the kids have read this panel and then was like, all right, and threw away their toys.
01:14:32
Speaker
The X-Men shoot across the desert in a weird, ugly ship, all having extremely distilled thoughts or conversations about their character motivations on their way to Magneto's lair.
01:14:45
Speaker
They arrive to find Magneto getting drunk with the wasp and discuss joining forces. So one of the things that... So Colossus is sitting there just dreaming about marrying Kitty Pryde.
01:15:00
Speaker
Yes. Weird. Yeah, he's like, oh, I want to be home and marry Kitty Pryde in couple years. And one of the ways that um Magneto is wooing the wasp is he ah pulls stray metal particles from the air to make a comb.
01:15:19
Speaker
Now, I was thinking, man metal's pretty heavy. How many stray metal particles are in the air? So I looked it up. All right. So a small metal comb, right? Like 30 grams or so. Okay.
01:15:34
Speaker
Sure. I did the math, and he would need about 1,500 Olympic-sized pools worth of air. Okay.
01:15:45
Speaker
To find enough heavy metal to make this. Or the one and a half pyramids of Giza. So he would be reaching like miles. He would be reaching so fucking far to make this comb.
01:16:02
Speaker
um And the comb would be about, here, this is fun. he would be It would be about 39% aluminum. fifty four percent iron point zero one percent arsenic Is that bad?
01:16:17
Speaker
That's pretty bad. Well, I'm sure you'd be fine. 6% lead. Oh, no. And half a percent of cadmium. So, ah you know, if you didn't want to make it out of poison, and you wanted to exclude those last three, you'd have to do, like, ah another couple dozen swimming pools worth of air.
01:16:40
Speaker
Okay. So, I feel like if i if I went out into a big field... I could probably find find the air that I'm looking for. yeah i mean, if you're reaching all the way up to, like, the upper atmosphere to get that air, sure. Sure. Because I think the Pyramid of Giza is big bigger and wider than a big field.
01:17:07
Speaker
So, anyway, so Magneto's plans immediately turn murdery, though. So much for his fucking hero arc. Yeah, yeah. He says, why don't we kill the bad guys and the rest of the good guys?
01:17:24
Speaker
wasp reveals she's only pretending to like him all along she zaps him and then of the x-men for some reason and fly off in their jet sort of sort of uh she calls him the most evil scum since hitler
01:17:44
Speaker
well yeah he was he was gonna kill captain america matt which is also what he wanted to do he was gonna kill about ah two dozen people which makes him the most evil scum since hitler there's nobody besides hitler that killed more than 20 people it's it's i i have to guess that uh jan is not a history buff
01:18:14
Speaker
Oh, boy. um Meanwhile, thank God, the Hulk was able to catch the mountain that was falling on the Avengers. Remember when he could barely hold up, like, one little butt?
01:18:28
Speaker
That one little tiny, thin butt... that polaris right was yeah yeah on yeah anyway just a butt and that was just a butt uh he's able to catch the mountain and is using quote leverage to keep it from collapsing yes classic uh 60s comics yeah fucking excuse for how they can do something impossibly strong don't worry i've got leverage but yeah
01:19:00
Speaker
There is So the cover of this comic shows Hulk holding up a mountain. So we already know that they weren't going die. up Yeah, you knew it. and You know, the cover. But they and this is where, again, if I talk too long about this, I'm going to go fucking nuts. But they say that the Hulk is on the cover beneath 150 billion tons stands the Hulk. billion tons, mattt is how much this mountain weighs. How heavy is a mountain?
01:19:34
Speaker
How heavy is the sun? okay it's telling me how heavy the guy who played the mountain in the game of game of the game of the sun Well, 386 pounds.
01:19:47
Speaker
Okay, so with starting there, we're way off. How heavy is it? Okay, so let's look at, let's not look at fucking the Google AI thing. okay Seems like it's less than the sun.
01:20:01
Speaker
It seems like the sun is 2.192 times 10 to the 27th tons. so Okay. So this mountain is not as heavy as the sun.
01:20:12
Speaker
Oh, okay. So the earth okay is around 6 billion trillion metric tons. So maybe this is realistic.
01:20:26
Speaker
Billion trillion. Billion trillion is a lot of tons. Yeah. Okay. In Reddit, people are just arguing about mass versus weight.
01:20:40
Speaker
Here, people are just making fucking jokes. I don't know. i don't know. Nobody knows. Okay. Well, nobody in the world knows. We'll let 150 billion tons stand. That's how much the using leverage the Hulk is able to lift here. 178 billion is Mount Kilimanjaro.
01:20:59
Speaker
Oh, okay. 150 billion isn't far off for an actual mountain. Yeah, I guess not. Somebody did the research here pre-internet.
01:21:11
Speaker
Whoa. All right, man. All all right. All right. All right. Respect on Jim Stupid's name. I don't know if that was his choice. Reed yeah it steals Spider-Man's web shooters and all of Hawkeye's trick arrows so that he can improve Iron Man's armor real quick.
01:21:36
Speaker
Then he has Captain Marvel and Johnny Storm juice him up with energy, allowing him to blast through the mountain. They're free. who he survived a mountain dropping on their heads. What happens with Hawkeye and Spider-Man? They don't have their stuff.
01:21:53
Speaker
They complain about it a lot. They wander off to a village, you say, full of alien cat people. And I think they're just people with cat eyes. ah Yeah, yeah. i just it's I was trying to be concise.
01:22:07
Speaker
but it's nothing There's just nothing else about them that's cat-like, I guess, is my issue. But it is very definitively cat's eyes. Yeah, totally. And despite... Oh, um...
01:22:19
Speaker
It's at the base of the mountain that Galactus is standing on. One of these cat people is a healer, despite speak and despite speaking an alien language, treats all the wounded good guy's injuries.
01:22:31
Speaker
Johnny Storm immediately starts hitting on her. This guy just fucking does shit. This is the thing about Jim Stupid. He just does shit, and then later justifies it.
01:22:43
Speaker
There's so much shit. Absolute horseshit. Xavier compares himself to Hitler over the course of this comic. Yeah. For
Xavier's Controversial Statements
01:22:53
Speaker
erasing Spider-Man's memory. I guess just like Hitler, I erased a Spider-Man's memory. Remember when Hitler did that? He just does shit. he just He just has characters do shit, and then later he's like, oh, I can explain. Somebody will just explain it later.
01:23:13
Speaker
And most of the shit that they're doing isn't moving anything forward. Yeah. It's just them. they The other thing that's driving me nuts is they keep saying, this is war. Like when they're arguing about what their next step is. Somebody what steps in to say, this is war.
01:23:27
Speaker
what you know You are like 12 verse 12 right now. this is You're barely fielding a football team. This is not war. You
Galactus's Summoning
01:23:36
Speaker
guys aren't doing anything. Like that's the fucking thing about this. It's just, all right, we'll get to it.
01:23:42
Speaker
yes let's uh number five let's talk number five Matt the battle of four armies armies armies it says this will be good We finally figure out what Galactus is doing. He was summoning his spaceship from the other side of the universe. All right. In the village that the heroes found, the healer lady, Zaji, za makes Johnny Storm inhale some vapor that lets them share memories, and then they get horned up and bone. Yeah, they bone.
01:24:15
Speaker
Meanwhile, Peter Rasputin is flopping around in bed, moping about Kitty Pryde. x Xavier summons the X-Men to tell them about Galactus, and when Magneto orders them to ready a ship, there's a minor leadership crisis.
01:24:30
Speaker
They're like, you're not my leader, Storm is, and Cyclops thinks, but maybe I should be. And then Professor X overrides everyone and tells them to do what Magneto says.
01:24:41
Speaker
Then he and Magneto use their combined mental powers to try and reach Galactus telepathically, but all they do is annoy him. Plus, Reed Richards is just flailing and waving in front him. He's just walking around! Hey!
01:24:57
Speaker
Galactus! Galactus! It's me, Reed! It's like one of those inflatable, this shit out front of a fucking car dealership. yeah me
Villain Dynamics and Battles
01:25:08
Speaker
Yeah.
01:25:09
Speaker
Hey! You know me! Do you remember me, Reed Richards? Go on! Hey! Pay attention to me i In response, Galactus sends a fight robot down to the village. Ooh.
01:25:22
Speaker
Molecule Man gets feisty when the wrecking crew try to bully him and he and Vulcana fuck up Piledriver pretty good. This happens to Piledriver several times in movie.
01:25:37
Speaker
He is the in this lowly group of idiots. He is the lowest and most idiot. in The runt of the litter. Doom's getting ready for battle and has to rebuff Enchantress when she tries to seduce him. Like, come on, do me, baby. Let's let's just get out of here. Let's get out of here. i want to go home. Let's leave together. Leave this all behind. Just you and me.
01:26:02
Speaker
It doesn't work. shit Oh, sorry. Here's one of the. So. ah Molecule Man and Vulcana are getting pretty into each other. They're like walking around holding hands. Molecule Man is big, shy nerd. And he he's...
01:26:18
Speaker
Talking about how he always got picked on and he says, did I tell you about the chicken feather incident in junior high school? And she goes, yes, that sounds awful. but yeah This is your new girlfriend, man, and she is way hotter than you. Do not tell her about the chicken feather incident in junior high school. And stop telling her about it multiple times. yeah Stop asking her if she's heard Bury this one.
01:26:45
Speaker
bure this one I just tell all my girlfriends this.
01:26:50
Speaker
The heroes just finish barely beating up Galactus's robot when the villains attack. Tired and fucked up already, they start to lose. They're caught off guard again, Matt.
01:27:01
Speaker
When the X-Men show up, yeah they gain the upper hand pretty quickly, but Colossus gets injured by Wrecker in the process. Okay. I don't think that would happen.
01:27:13
Speaker
An enchantress teleports the villains away. because they're just they They have their enchanted crowbar and they're just prying away. at There's no seams in his... The X-Men run away as Professor X thinks the mutants serve as a third force in the war. Not good guys or bad guys, but a third thing.
01:27:33
Speaker
And they leave Klosses behind. They leave him behind. He says, yes fucking Magneto tells him, we cannot, we cannot afford to be encumbered by casualties. What happened to no mutant blood will be spilled?
01:27:48
Speaker
you from like three issues ago. That's not just, that's not from outside of this world. He said that just in his comic. We know, which we do know, but he said, fucking you suck, James.
01:28:03
Speaker
He also also Colossus jumped out of a fucking spaceship. He jumped in the into the void of space to rescue Storm when he thought she was to be left behind. And nobody.
01:28:16
Speaker
We'll just walk back into town to get him. That's all they have to do. That's all they have to do. Her bad guys are gone. sucks. And what is a third force mean? What is it even fucking? All right. Whatever, whatever, whatever, whatever, whatever.
01:28:32
Speaker
I think it's true. Can you say this? The Human Torch is racist at Colossus, but his new girlfriend, Zaji, comes and heals him anyway. ah Peter is suddenly smitten with the woman and can't think about Kitty Pryde anymore. Instead, he's suddenly super jealous of Johnny Storm.
01:28:49
Speaker
this wo The girl that he was thinking of marrying! Just a moment ago. He suddenly... he's just like, ah, snakes entirely.
01:29:00
Speaker
Forget her. I've never spoken to this woman with cat eyes. And I am so deeply in love with her. I'm not able to speak to her. She doesn't speak a language that I, yeah.
01:29:16
Speaker
Yeah. And, spain and I watched her kiss human toy. Whatever. My immediate thought here is like, oh, maybe this is part of the healing process that they fall in love with her. And they do say that later.
01:29:32
Speaker
Sort of. Yeah. It's towards the very end of the comic. Yeah. Somebody remembers that they need to resolve this. So I think that's how they, that's how they choose to do it. Well, good thing this won't stick with Colossus's character for the next year and deeply affect his relationship with Kitty Pryde in the good comic that we read. Oh yeah. I certainly hope not. Yeah. Probably that won't happen.
01:29:58
Speaker
Also. When Storm unleashed some crazy weather on the villains, it caught Galactus's attention for just a second, and Doom snuck aboard his spaceship. He wants to
Dazzler's Past and Enchantress's Manipulations
01:30:09
Speaker
use it to control Galactus and the Beyonder.
01:30:12
Speaker
Oh. Oh. Well. We're told his spaceship is the size of a solar system, and I'm going to skip past your issues with the use of that term in general. Yeah.
01:30:30
Speaker
you know forget this no you're no you don't forget it but you don't need to say it for us to realize how stupid it is okay thank you so number six a little death we cut back to the wasp who doesn't actually know how to fly the st ship she stole from the x-men she crash lands in a swamp and finds the lizard raging at great plan fucking wasp amazing heroics She just flies away. Also, she gets to the swamp because there's like a glow. There's like a glow on the map that she goes.
01:31:08
Speaker
Okay. What was the glow? Was Shooter. Yeah. Stupid, I mean, implying that wasth that that in the machine and the jet was a mini Cerebro and that he thinks Lizard is a mutant?
01:31:26
Speaker
Was he supposed... Oh. Well, it's not... Like, this isn't a ship that belongs to the X-Men, so... Then what would the blinking light be for? Yeah, why is she even... hip Yeah, I know.
01:31:39
Speaker
i We won't come back to this. Despite his attempts to scare her, she's he's actually yeah injured and pretty scared himself. She treats his wounds. They become for friends.
01:31:51
Speaker
Oh. Doctor Doom, meanwhile, is fiddling with Gatorade the gadgets on Galactus's ship when he accidentally summons Claw, the sound-based Fantastic Four villain.
01:32:04
Speaker
Right. Apparently, he was zapped into Galactus by Dazzler? all right. Sure. Okay. I've read all of Dazzler, so I can just give you a little. In Dazzler 9, she was abducted. Okay, so this will be interesting because we're about to deal with Dazzler in like the near future. Yeah.
01:32:24
Speaker
She was abducted by Project Pegasus. and quasar okay right and experimented on and when she tried to escape she saw it like claw was like i gotta to escape they're gonna they're get they're gonna they're evil which of course they're evil they kidnapped you and started anyway she frees claw and then he attacks her and he's like ah i tricked you they're not evil i'm evil well all right no i don't it didn't make any sense anyway
01:32:58
Speaker
ah During the fight, she absorbed him because she absorbs sound and turns it into light. ah Then she ran away because she was a murderer. Then in Dazzler 10, she's kidnapped by Galactus. See, in these first, like, 10 to 12 issues of Dazzler, it's just...
01:33:14
Speaker
um her appearing in or other like in big heroes or villains stories or other big she's touching like every corner of the marvel universe yeah it's like girl girl but yes 100 dude so she's kidnapped by galactus because now she's super charged so she's super powerful and she's sent into a black hole to get terax his his last um His last, whatever, his last herald.
01:33:46
Speaker
Yeah. Oh, and she's sent into a black hole because, you know, she's ah so much light so she can survive it. That's what black hole is. She releases all her super light energy in space and he sends her back home because she's powerless now.
01:34:03
Speaker
These are Tom DeFalco's final two issues of the book. So this is where either he quits or gets fired. So we just spoiled the end of Dazzler?
01:34:14
Speaker
oh Dazzler goes on for another like 30 issues before it's canceled. um And Claw in these in that first issue in Dazzler 9 was not a weird, sniveling, crazy person. He was like a villainy villain. But in yeah this,
01:34:33
Speaker
ah he's crazy now. Yes, and Jim Stupid's idea of crazy is just having him repeat the last syllable of the word he said. Yeah, he's like, know. He's like a Johnny Two Times from Goodfellas.
01:34:47
Speaker
Nice to meet you, Doom, oom, oom um We'll go get the papers, papers. He agrees to help Doom um to try try to steal Galactus's power.
01:35:00
Speaker
Xavier manages to enter Enchantress's mind to spy on the bad guys long enough to see Claw teleport into the bad guy lair and start giving orders on behalf of Doom.
01:35:12
Speaker
um He sends Cyclops, he gives orders to Ultron, which you note in our notes here that he reveals the code word to get Ultron on his side.
01:35:27
Speaker
So why would the other villains not just use that same code word immediately? Right. He comes he comes down. he says, Doom has sent me. They say,
X-Men's Leadership Issues
01:35:36
Speaker
we're not going to listen to you. yeah to How'd you even get here? And he's and he's like, bing, bong, bing, gie, dong.
01:35:42
Speaker
And yeah, Ultron is like, no, he's right. But now everybody knows it. now yeah and There's a villain that has the opportunity in the near future to...
01:35:54
Speaker
pretend to give orders on behalf of Doom and doesn't use that tactic, doesn't even think of it Yeah, yeah, yeah, stupid. um no um Okay, Xavier sends Cyclops, Rogue, and Wolverine to intercept whatever they're going after on the planet's volcanic plains, causing Storm to confront x Xavier about who leads the X-Men. This fucking conversation.
01:36:21
Speaker
It's so, there's no...
01:36:25
Speaker
there's no concept of who yeah storm is in Jim stupid's mind. It is we like, he is clueless about any of her actual character. Yes. She comes off like a whiny little child here. And then I want to leave the X-Men. Right. And he like, he's like, I, I'm, he's clear about like, I'm giving the commands. And if you don't want to do it,
01:36:49
Speaker
I will psychically force you to comply. I will mind control you to comply. Yes. And that's essentially the end of the conflict. Yeah.
01:37:00
Speaker
The fucking... It's... That's all right. Maybe he's just reacting to the fact that Enchantress just told him your power is a joke.
01:37:11
Speaker
Yeah, sure. That's got to sting. That's got to stick with x Xavier for years. My power is a joke. He thought he could go tie toe to toe with a goddess. He just learned he can't. He gets kicked out of her mind.
01:37:26
Speaker
Another bad piece of dialogue, Jim's stupid dialogue, is ah Wolverine says, I'm going to rip somebody. yeah yeah right.
01:37:38
Speaker
Back in the Cat People village, Peter tells Zaji how utterly in love with her he is as she heals him, which she cannot understand. Johnny swoops in and starts making out with her in front of him.
01:37:49
Speaker
and not sure why we saw all this. No. And we get a ah Peter like, face. That's very funny. They him a real big butt chin, too. And he's like, up in the
Avengers' Plan Against Galactus
01:38:03
Speaker
mountains, the Avengers discuss their plan to beat Galactus.
01:38:07
Speaker
Hit him. Really hard. Ooh. Whoa. Smart. Spider-Man and Hawkeye can commiserate over reed taking their gear while Iron Man hits on Captain Marvel.
01:38:19
Speaker
Not sure why we saw all of this. Not sure. Rogue Wolverine and Cyclops arrive on the volcanic plains to find Titania, Docop, Absorbing Man, and Molecule Man clearly up to something.
01:38:31
Speaker
Molecule Man being the most dangerous, Wolverine goes right for him, but as he starts to slice through him, Cyclops blasts his arm to prevent him from making the wound mortal. the bad guys runs off The bad guys run off as Owen bleeds out. Scott telling Wolverine they never kill.
01:38:50
Speaker
That was the plan. he Yeah, I know. who it's a He said, take out Molecule Man to Wolverine. Well, fucking, and okay. There's so much wrong here. First of all, ah Professor X says, like, just observe them.
01:39:06
Speaker
So the X-Men fly right in front of the villains, land their big-ass ship in front of them, and they go, oh no, we got noticed. We have to fight them now. We have to stop them. we You were told to just observe them, and you didn't. Anyway, and then when Cyclops tells him, like, hey, ah you know, go take out Molecule Man, Wolverine says, shut up, Cyclops! Hmm. And he calls Cyclops a jerk.
01:39:32
Speaker
it does see I do love. Shut up, Cyclops.
01:39:43
Speaker
i The thesis of this whole issue is quiet. Do as I say. And like, this is like. All right. So many characters say a version of this.
01:39:56
Speaker
Or this fucking exactly. Like, we're doing something important. Just listen to me. I'm the leader. And i not to get too psychoanalytical here, but this, I mean, clearly this is what jim James is going through at the time, right? Jim Stupid? Yeah, yeah. He's like, I know these characters. I want to do a good Marvel. yeah And you all just got to shut up and listen to me.
01:40:24
Speaker
And no one will like Like, that's like what he's... It's so transparent. like Xavier is the is supposed to be the morally correct one when he's like, actually, i should be in charge here.
01:40:38
Speaker
yeah it's not It's not like an actual leadership struggle. It's storm whining or Cyclops whining while Xavier says... I'm going to do it right. And then he does it right.
01:40:50
Speaker
And same with Doom. And same with, like like, so many times people are just like, shut up. I'm in charge. And, like, ah Cyclops telling it to Wolverine. Like, so many people are like, you shut up now. I'm in charge.
01:41:05
Speaker
And it's it's such a great opportunity to start, like, changing dynamics on teams. Explore this. Like, let this... Let this sit for a minute, which is exactly what Jim stupid is telling all his writers to do. Yeah. And he can't do it. He gets to the moment and he says, ah the best thing here to do for them to do is just resolve it.
01:41:26
Speaker
Yeah. All right. Anyway, all of this is immediately irrelevant as Cyclops figures out why the bad guys were here in the first place and realizes their plan was brilliant. He starts blowing holes into craters, kicking off a chain of volcanic eruptions as the X-Men fly away.
01:41:44
Speaker
he calls himself brilliant and then sets off a hundred volcanoes.
01:41:52
Speaker
The wrecking crew have a big truck now. Clearly this is for toy purposes, right? Yes. This is just a big dump truck that's bright red and has some laser guns on it. Yeah. It's like just for kids to buy a toy that they can. be Anyway, um they track down the wasp and the lizard in the swamp. They shoot.
01:42:12
Speaker
They shoot wasp. Like in the heart, like through the chest into the heart in her heart. dead like actually dead she's dead and they use the truck stasis ray to kidnap them both the avengers meanwhile arrive back at the cat people village so reed can try chatting with galactus instead of the the whole plan they were making earlier A mysterious feminine figure watches them from the shadows.
01:42:45
Speaker
Ooh. Oh, boy. Oh, boy. Oh, boy. Oh, boy. Oh, boy. Okay. How are you feeling so far? besides besides Besides just angry.
01:42:57
Speaker
Oh, then I i don't know. I can't. No, i this is bad. ah So far, it feels like it is...
01:43:11
Speaker
kind of directionless it does feel like it's being made up as we go along there's a lot of there's too many
01:43:21
Speaker
logical leaps for me to be able to ignore like typically every comic book gets a few right but every issue here has so many inconsistencies in it or things that just wouldn't be possible yeah And it's clear to me that Jim Stupid doesn't know how to write dialogue. My big highlights here.
01:43:44
Speaker
Right. So, we I mean, we have Galactus doing something mysterious. We have the X-Men just, like, off on their own, just, like, playing around.
01:43:55
Speaker
Just, like, doing some weird shit that is nothing, like... Like... who what What are they even... What are their plans, even? Right. It's just kind of ramble around until we figure out what to do.
01:44:11
Speaker
And the bad guys and good guys similarly, except for they're like, and now we attack each other. Let's attack them. oh now let's attack them. No, let's attack them. Magneto is supposed to, this is supposed to be his like hero arc, but he like, but that falls apart instantly.
01:44:31
Speaker
a Right. Because he wants to kill the Avengers. He wants to kill the Avengers. And i mean, even from Jim Stupard's perspective, he's like, oh, actually, in his own way, Magneto is something of a hero.
01:44:46
Speaker
And then he's like, wasps. And then he has wasps say, you're basically Hitler. Well, you can't have it both ways. Fucking. Jim. And I'll tell you, this is the halfway mark. It is not going to get better. it shows it shows more promise in these next six issues, but it ah ah goes back on those promises pretty quick.
01:45:09
Speaker
Well, what I... Besides Doctor Doom... Dr. Doom's whatever Dr. Doom is planning and whatever Galactus is planning besides those two things none of these other actions are building to anything and that's what really bugs me is like there's no there's no there's not an arc happening it is just unconnected or barely connected events it is just and then and then and then kind of storytelling yeah
01:45:40
Speaker
Yes, they will spend half an issue max executing a plan and then whatever they end up doing as part of that plan is canceled out by whatever comes next.
01:45:52
Speaker
Yeah, there's just like there's an action. There's a consequence. There's an action. There's a consequence. There's not like nobody's building towards anything. There's no there's no this isn't a why are we watching this?
01:46:03
Speaker
And what is the purpose of this story? It's not like a smart consequence. It's not a dramatic consequence. There's no irony to what they're doing. It's not a consequence that's led by or that's that's a result of the last few actions they took. It is directly like the very last thing. This man.
01:46:24
Speaker
This man is stronger than me. Yes. Oh, but now he's not stronger than me. Oh, my God. right. Okay. So let's, let's just do a sprint. Like well we're still going to make our jokes and our notes and all that shit, but we're not going to pause between issues. We're just going to fucking roll.
01:46:44
Speaker
Let's burn through a couple here. We've been through enough. Number seven. See Marvel's superhero secret was number seven. Berserker. better
01:46:57
Speaker
The new spider woman is just here now. I'm Spider-Woman. Matt, those are her first two lines in the comic. I think across the first like three or four pages that she's she says, I'm Spider-Woman. And then she says, hi, I'm Spider-Woman. Yeah, yeah. And she has to because this is her debut.
01:47:22
Speaker
Mm-hmm. This is the mysterious woman lurking in the shadows from last issue. This is... She's here now and she's never existed before. She is just another Spider-Man, but girl.
01:47:35
Speaker
And it was just, we need a character to sell a toy of. And there's already a Spider-Woman! Yes. Look, she was in Denver. She was in Denver! She was. Okay. Where Volcana and Titania lived.
01:47:50
Speaker
Some story out of this, there was a small suburb of Denver, about one square mile of a small suburb of Denver that where spider was used to compile this planet galaxies away from Earth. And three women lived.
01:48:07
Speaker
Two always wanted to be supervillains, and one was Spider-Woman. Who was already Spider-Wood. So this is, if you haven't guessed, the third character that they produced for Mattel when Mattel was like, this sounds great, but we could use more toys.
01:48:25
Speaker
Yes. Yeah. So, I i mean, it's it's not a bad marketing. Already have a Wasp toy. Just make a second Spider-Man. I know. I know.
01:48:37
Speaker
And then also the wrecking crew shows up in their big tank and throwing wasps corpse out into the hero village. That's pretty. Great. That's cold. They just, they just stomp through in their dump truck and toss a dead body out on their way. Yeah. Yeah.
01:48:56
Speaker
And nobody does anything about it. Yeah. They're like, Oh man. Zazie tries to revive the wasp, but she's dead dead. She's dead. Dead. Like we watched her get shot through the heart. The heroes want revenge, but Cap is like, no, Galactus is the bigger threat here.
01:49:15
Speaker
The heroes want to fight Galactus, but Cap is like, no, he's too powerful. So they just do nothing. They do nothing. It's not true. They don't do exactly nothing. They spend a lot of time talking about how smart and capable of a leader Captain America has yeah um is. Okay. We watched Wasp get shot through the heart, pulled into a car, driven for who knows how long.
01:49:44
Speaker
then thrown out of that car and flop limply on the ground. So even if she was still even a little bit alive at that point, probably broke her k neck or her back. Yeah, yeah.
01:49:55
Speaker
Like, now she's dead. And she was. We watched her get shot through the heart as well. Yeah. I feel like that's very. Okay. If you can't see where we're going with this, then you soon will.
01:50:07
Speaker
Meanwhile, the X-Men are going to capture the big volcano task force. Wait. Meanwhile, the X-Men are going to capture the Volcano task force in a pincher maneuver. Molecule Man is dying, and Volcana sees this on a big screen, so she makes a deal with Enchantress to teleport her onto the Volcano team's ship.
01:50:28
Speaker
She gets there just as the X-Men attack. They have a fight, and the bad guys get away, and basically nothing important happens. All right, so nothing's happened so far, this Yeah, so they went to intercept it. They did, but then the bad guys escaped.
01:50:40
Speaker
We're back to... okay where we were before this issue started there's one thing that keeps happening here enchantress uh does it in this case she calls vulcana fat a few times as she's like making her deal with her she's like i can't teleport you you're too fat when the wrecking crew was bullying molecule man they were calling her a cow they were calling her like huge and she's Not. No, she's a little she's in when she's not in volcano form. She is just in a one piece swimming suit.
01:51:15
Speaker
ah She's curvy. She's got hips and breasts, but like she is very fit. She's muscular. She's cut. cut And there's no one saying anything to the opposite. There's no one challenging everyone calling her fat. This is Jim stupid saying, this is what I think is a fat person, which is just a woman with large breasts.
01:51:38
Speaker
Right. And he's like, we shouldn't be mean to fat people. Like all these guys, like all these villains are, but this is this person. Just so you know, this person, she is fat. But it's pretty disgusting. But you shouldn't be mean about it. It's bad to be mean to Don't say it.
01:51:56
Speaker
But she she is. But guys, she is fat. But she's a fucking cow. hu but
01:52:05
Speaker
Galactus is distracted for a moment by the volcanoes and also noticing Dr. Doom and kicking him out of his Galactus ship. When Doom gets home, he's sad and gives up.
01:52:16
Speaker
oh Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Oh, great. Cyclops, you really did a great job there setting off those volcanoes. It kind of almost alerted Galactus.
01:52:28
Speaker
It almost stopped him for four seconds. I think the best justification we get here is that when the volcanoes are going off, the planet is less pleasant to eat than yeah So we slow Galactus down. He doesn't like start eating the planet just yet. He's like, ah, is getting heartburn. Exactly. I got to go take my pill. Like both me and you did right before we started this recording. Because we were both about to drink drinks.
01:53:00
Speaker
We were like, ah this the bubbles are going to give me. I'm about to drink anything that's not water. This this will give me indigestion. ah
01:53:13
Speaker
I sympathize with Galactus. I'm on his side.
01:53:19
Speaker
All the villain teams get back to the bad guy base and go to sleep. But She-Hulk snuck into the bad guy base and gets ganged up on by like literally oh all the villains. And it's brutal.
01:53:32
Speaker
And it looks like she might be dead. This looks really bad. Like this is a it is uncomfortable. I'm sure this has been written about in the way that this is the sort of violence that only happens to women in comic books. She's on the ground with a bunch of people pounding on her. i Yeah, yeah.
01:53:51
Speaker
And she it's it's also it's not an out of character move for her to make. This was actually, I think, smart where like the Avengers are talking about what to do next and they decide not to avenge the wasp who's dead. And she's like, fuck you. Jennifer Walters, just she just walks off. She she doesn't say a thing. She just well, I mean, it's an angry look on her face and ah shows up at the bad guy compound to kick some ass. Yeah, yeah, totally.
01:54:20
Speaker
And honestly, if we're talking like power scaling, which I know is a sin in any team up comic, but She-Hulk doesn't get beat by a combination of the Wrecking Crew and Dr. Octopus. are Are you kidding?
01:54:36
Speaker
She tears his arms off. Yeah, okay. But I think ah Titania and ah Absorbing Man are a little tougher, but yes yeah. But you're right. But you're right.
01:54:49
Speaker
In the Hero Village, they notice She-Hulk's missing and they all want to go get her. But Cap, again, is like, no, we still do nothing. But then Xavier pops in and is like, hey, the X-Men are nearby and we'll watch Galactus for you if you want to go get the bad guys. So Cap's finally like, OK, let's go get the bad guys. They're going to go back to the bad guys.
01:55:12
Speaker
Also, Colossus finds Zaji leaving the hut where the wasp's corpse is and she collapses in his arms. So number eight, Invasion. The Avengers, etc. burst through the wall of the bad guy lair and have a big action figure battle. Spider-Man and Spider-Woman basically beat everyone up.
01:55:32
Speaker
The Thing loses his rocks again and Spider-Man rips his costume. Those are the notable moments. Wow. There is... There's a good moment where as absorbing man is beating somebody up and the thing walks up and he says, why don't you pick on someone as ugly as yourself? Sorby, in which case you'll have to leave everybody alone.
01:55:56
Speaker
That's pretty good. Pretty good for a, for a Ben Krim line. I'll give him Um, How long have they been beating She-Hulk? They're still beating her up! that Right, they just threw the entire time it took the Avengers to get here. Yeah, exactly. They're still just taking turns kicking her.
01:56:16
Speaker
um Also, okay, here's just some random notes. The forts keep changing shape. Right. Enchantress, she's spending this entire series just sitting around eating or drinking and complaining about shit. too What is her... It's great. she's drunk Yeah, what is her motivation? What is ever?
01:56:41
Speaker
So ever, I don't know, i I'm not following Thor. Her motivation here is to marry Thor. ah It is, I'm telling you, it is ripped directly from the pages of Frank Miller's Daredevil that's going on at the same time where...
01:56:59
Speaker
ah Just like Electra with Daredevil, she is hoping that he will return her love for him and that she can, through that, corrupt him a bit and convince him not to be the goody two-shoes that he is. But she feels herself drifting more towards being good than she ever thought she could because of the potential of loving Thor.
01:57:23
Speaker
but she doesn't But Enchantress doesn't feel any potential to be good in this. She's just like, but I love being evil so much! If you love being evil, what do you possibly like about Thor?
01:57:41
Speaker
Yeah. Listen, if you took... what that year-long arc that frank miller spent developing electra and and the love uh the conflicts of love between her and daredevil and distilled it into the 15 to 20 lines that enchantress gets in this uh in this run yeah yeah hawkeye at one point says My bow at this range, an arrow hits a lot harder than any bullet when Piledriver, I think, is like...
01:58:15
Speaker
Oh, right. He's like, 38s bounce off my chest. What's your bow and arrow going to do? And he's like, at this range. so No, it's not. No, it's literally. Literally, no, it's not. No, it's not. No, it's not. At any range, no, it's not. powerful And we also, we know he was just carving these arrows out of wood. But even if it was like carbon fiber or steel, no, it's not.
01:58:39
Speaker
By magnitudes of like 10 to 100. Yeah.
01:58:45
Speaker
Unbelievable. Insane.
01:58:49
Speaker
Okay. What else happens here? um Across the complex, Claw can't bear to see Lizard locks up and he frees him from his cage. An arrowless Hawkeye and a powerless Ben Grimm stumble upon them, Claw and Lizard, and they just make friends with them.
01:59:08
Speaker
It's kind of cute. <unk> They're both powerless. They come upon these menacing but very stupid figures. And they're like, we'll have to outwit them. And then when we see them again, they're playing Patty. Patty Cake, all right, is a little uninspired.
01:59:23
Speaker
Yeah, you you're making you have a good bit here, but you are fucking up the landing. You're making the yeah, you're making the most A to B choice. Yeah, yeah. In a hat on a hat. Yeah, exactly. In that bit where like they could have been like, I don't know, maybe play pickup sticks with Hawkeye's arrows would have been a little better.
01:59:46
Speaker
Oh, that would have been cute. Yeah. Yeah. The point is it's cute. It's cute. They find Doom Catatonic in his armor. We're trying to compliment stupid here. They find Doom Catatonic in his armor.
02:00:01
Speaker
They find She-Hulk alive but unconscious. And then they lock all the bad guys up and claim the bad guy lair as their new good guy fortress. They lock the lizard and claw back up. They make friends with them. They have these powerful allies and there's no point to that because they just put them right back in the cells. Right back. yeah There's also sort of a secondary battle here between Spider-Man and Titania where Titania is watching this go down and she's standing up in the rafters trying to push a giant steel beam down onto everybody like ah like a looney tune. Yeah. Spider-Man finds her and says, and I absolutely love this. You know, I had a feeling somebody was up here in the rafters trying to drop a 40 ton beam on her head.
02:00:47
Speaker
ah Okay. You wrote one good joke, stupid. for the two Also, Molecule Man protects him and Volcana by, quote, fusing some air molecules.
02:01:03
Speaker
Into a ah force field. Sure. Man. Fine. i I don't care about either of their powers. I'm invested in their love story at this point.
02:01:15
Speaker
Oh, boy. Oh, boy. Oh, boy. Okay. Everyone recovers from battle when Spider-Man notices that Thor has got both his hat and cape back. He and Hulk let Spider-Man know they found a device that can make costumes.
02:01:29
Speaker
And Spider-Man, his costume in tatters, runs to find it. He finds. Yeah. Oh, yeah. We found a costume device in there.
02:01:39
Speaker
Hulk's like and Thor's like, I got to remake my hat and cape. And Hulk is like, oh, I'm all right with my ripped up purple shorts and nothing else. i I assumed he had them make a new pair of ripped up purple shorts.
02:01:55
Speaker
Spider-Man finds what he's pretty sure is the device that they were talking about and grabs the little black orb of goo he finds in the device. It starts crawling up his arm, then engulfs his whole body, ah and we see Spider-Man in a brand new outfit, pitch black, except the white eyes and the white spider emblazoned on his chest.
02:02:19
Speaker
He loves it It's a good look. you can't You can't deny the debut of the black suit Spider-Man is a very good panel. hey His joy is interrupted by an earthquake, though, and then a psychic message from Xavier to all the good guys.
02:02:38
Speaker
Galactus has started eating the planet! Oh, no! um I guess we also missed the fact where the wasp isn't dead. Oh, ah yes the the wasp.
02:02:54
Speaker
Somebody must have forgotten to mention that in this recap that they read. ah ah Yeah, she it turns out, you idiot, that she wasn't dead. She was just in a death-like stasis, you moron. you know what? I was hoping she wasn't dead. She was just in some kind of death-like stasis.
02:03:16
Speaker
Let's get right into number nine. Assault on Galactus. Colossus somehow intuits that Galactus has begun to devour the planet, and he steals up for the first time in like seven issues.
02:03:30
Speaker
He creeps on an unconscious Zaji and heads off fight Meanwhile, Storm is already there hammering on the dude with lightning, Galactus. leave her alone please and then he head up to fight galactctu she has a boyfriend yeah just and you don't know her you've never talked to her in your life meanwhile storm is already up there hammering on the dude with lightning galactus the other x man charge The other X-Men charge in, but Galactus throws a big doinket at them.
02:04:03
Speaker
It is the exact shape. They designed the doinket on this device. Yeah, they made the doinket based on his drones. And we cut to the Avengers as they watch a massive explosion and surmise that if the X-Men were up there, they were all dead now.
02:04:22
Speaker
Oh no, are the X-Men dead? Are the X-Men dead? Is the first Claremont fired? They're just like, they're just they've been up there telling each other to shut up and silence every time one of them talks.
02:04:34
Speaker
Shut up, Cyclops. Shut up! Silence! Shut up! Silence! Just always every line of dialogue. The heroes take off in a jet toward Galactus, and on the way, Spider-Man realizes his new costume makes its own webs. Ooh.
02:04:50
Speaker
Ben Grimm turns back into the thing, and Hulk realizes he's getting dumber. Aww. lot of wins wins and losses over here. They get shot out of the sky, but Colossus catches them.
02:05:03
Speaker
They all jump out and start fighting a bunch of Galactus's doinkets. But Reed Richards is suddenly like, wait, stop. If Galactus kills all of us by eating the planet, he wins.
02:05:15
Speaker
And the Beyonder will cure his hunger. We'll save countless lives by letting ourselves die. hmm. It's actually a very Reed Richards moment here. I i will say ah the opening of this where the X-Men are charging Galactus's fortress and fighting off like... Doinkets.
02:05:33
Speaker
Doinkets. Classic X-Men, including these wacky gadgets that they have to yeah have to fight. And then... Moses Magnum might have thrown doinkets at them. it's Exactly. And then Reed Richards...
02:05:48
Speaker
Being like, hey, everybody stop fighting. i have a solution that number one doesn't involve violence and number two involves us to or involves us all sacrificing ourselves but saving countless lives across the universe. it And it it is an interesting thought. Yeah. Like, what if we just let o ourselves lose and then we save the it universe from Galactus? It's a it's a yeah.
02:06:16
Speaker
Right. By by healing Galactus, too, not by killing Galactus, which is it's right. It's extremely Reed Richards is very fantastic for this issue has promise.
02:06:28
Speaker
OK, it's going to be great. Then he, Galactus, Galactus' planet-eating machine, and the entire top of the mountain all disappear. Galactus wants to talk to Reed, apparently.
02:06:42
Speaker
Back at the base, Doom escapes like it's nothing and frees Claw. The last issue was pointless. yeah At the mountain, Colossus digs the X-Men out of the rock. They're fine.
02:06:53
Speaker
that This already happened a few issues ago to the Avengers. We knew. Yeah, yeah it already yeah we did this already. The first few pages were pointless. Everyone goes back to the village. Zashi is awake, but she runs to Johnny Storm instead of Colossus. Yeah, that's her boyfriend.
02:07:10
Speaker
Reed pops back into the village, and apparently Galactus told him Reed was a champion of life, while Galactus was an instrument of death. Okay. This is where it falls off the rails. Number one, you're telling me I don't get to watch Galactus and Reed Richards have this conversation about the philosophy of life?
02:07:34
Speaker
This is what I read comics for. Yeah, yeah, yeah. and And he comes back and he's like, actually, I don't even know what that means. What did he mean when he said, am the champion of life and he's an instrument of death?
02:07:49
Speaker
I should have asked. Maybe it meant attack him. Maybe it meant don't attack him. ah Yeah. Jesus Christ. So the Fantastic Three aren't going to fight, but everyone else is, including the X-Men after Captain America shakes Professor X's hand.
02:08:08
Speaker
Okay. It's a big moment. they weren't i I guess they were fighting. Yeah. Galactus has stopped throwing doinkets and is fighting himself. He must be running low on power.
02:08:19
Speaker
Then the Fantastic Three join again. The past 10 pages were pointless. We're all just fighting Galactus again. They trash the machine, but let Galactus flee to a ship. Reed tells them that this means the hero's lost.
02:08:36
Speaker
Galactus never actually needed the machine to eat the planet. The past five issues were pointless. He's going to go eat his own ship for power. and then I'm going to eat my own ship. I don't need your stupid planet.
02:08:52
Speaker
Anyway, dr Doom had been chopping up claw into slices, like butter thin slices. He has a plan to steal all of Galactus's energy. Yeah.
02:09:04
Speaker
yeah Number 10, death to the beyonder. Galactus ah starts eating his own ship. And the good guys all watch as he starts absorbing energy.
02:09:19
Speaker
before ah it redirects and all shoots back to one point on the planet. Captain Marvel follows the energy trail to the bad guy lair to find Doom absorbing absorbing all the energy through a device he built out of a bunch of tiny slices of claw. She transmits all of this psychically back to the good guys as they observe.
02:09:41
Speaker
Doom reckons with his new power. learning that he's powerful now beyond comprehension the first thing he does when he gets godlike powers before he gets control of them when it's still just his subconscious excuse me when it's still just his subconscious sort of taking over and doing like just creating his greatest desires he just makes the room look like himself Just all the walls turned into his face. All the walls turned into his face. Exactly. And the floor. and this It's just like, yeah this rules.
02:10:18
Speaker
Fuck yeah, man. He takes a few minutes to rein it in and being all powerful detects Captain Marvel's ah spying presence.
02:10:30
Speaker
Her mental connection to the good guys is suddenly cut off. Uh-oh. So they spring into action. Magneto flies in them off towards the bad guy lair in a dead spaceship while Wolverine and Captain America argue about mutant issues.
02:10:49
Speaker
Wolverine says to Captain America, he's just talking about like, you don't know how hard it is to be a mutant. He says, it's a lot like how the Nazis went after the Jews. Yeah.
02:11:01
Speaker
Yeah, it's, you know, why spend years carefully weaving this theme into your work about this very character when you can just have Wolverine straight up say it in one panel?
02:11:13
Speaker
Do you think Jim Stupid was like, like thought he invented that? He was like, I've been reading this comic and I had a thought. think he read God Loves Man Kills and was like,
02:11:26
Speaker
You know, my God, this makes nobody mentioned this before. This makes me think of something. He also Captain America refers to Magneto as a terrorist.
02:11:40
Speaker
Wolverine says terrorists. That's what the big army calls the little army. Yeah, it it is. Like, fucking A, man. Yeah, that's smart. That's true, and that's real, and that is something that it's people still don't seem to fucking understand in... hey Anyway.
02:12:00
Speaker
Yeah. Doom, meanwhile, ponders his next step with all his new power. He sets off to kill the Beyonder. The good guys arrive just moments later, and Claw's head catches them up on what they've missed. i Like, this is so not Claw.
02:12:16
Speaker
Yes, but i is I'm starting to like this character. Yeah. once Once he's a disembodied head because the rest of his body has been sliced up and turned into a device. And he didn't even care. and he was like, oh, thank ah yeah, he cut my body up.
02:12:31
Speaker
Yeah. but This is interrupted by another earthquake as Doom takes his opening shots at the Beyonder. The good guy's watching a monitor on a monitor as the base falls apart around them. Colossus also checks in on the cat people who are in danger from the earthquakes.
02:12:47
Speaker
He nobly opts to tell Johnny since Zaji would want to be rescued by him. But Johnny says, I've got no time for chippies right now.
02:12:58
Speaker
What a jerk. we You don't have to get that reductive about it, dude. Wait, but I'm confused. He wasn't offering him chippies. He was telling him about a woman.
02:13:08
Speaker
I mean, I've said this. There's no time for eating chippies. I've said this to you before when we were like in the middle of ah we were arguing about some comedy show we were putting on. We had a difference of opinion and you were like, just eat some potato chips. And I said, this is no time for chippies. Yeah.
02:13:26
Speaker
Doom gets absolutely wrecked by the Beyonder, so he sends an energy form of himself directly to all the good guys, asking them to lend their power. Yeah, because he's about to beat the big bad guy that kidnapped them all and is, like, fucking... Yeah. And he i will he makes this very clear. He says, i am beyond your petty squabbles with all my power. I'm essentially a god.
02:13:50
Speaker
If you help me, we can defeat the Beyonder, restore everything to normal. Right. yeah All I need is one of you to help me. Because Jim Stupid is stupid, he also has Doom end this little monologue by saying something like... ah Something like...
02:14:16
Speaker
um And I can give you power beyond your wildest dreams. And it's like, okay, that's not what this is about. That's what he's saying. that But he does say it. He does say it. And he doesn't, that, yeah, that's not his point. Like you should have left that line out.
02:14:35
Speaker
Yeah. It's, it is, it is a very doom moment until the very end when he's like, good and unlimited power. Yeah. Jesus.
02:14:46
Speaker
You fucker.
02:14:49
Speaker
He certainly is close to being able to outmatch him, but the Beyonder, but Magneto. So Magneto jumps at the chance, but recoils before taking Doom's hand, considering how ah Xavier would act in that moment.
02:15:01
Speaker
like Xavier would make the wrong decision. Yeah, if that's a would be wrong that's what you think you would do in this moment, you should have done it. You'd be right. You would have been right. You would have been right. And two issues early. It's perfect. Yeah, you would have stopped the fucking Beyonder.
02:15:13
Speaker
Because as we're about to find out, Doom is right. He is about to crush the Beyonder. Calm down. Spoilers, Matt.
02:15:24
Speaker
Before he can decline the offer, though, he's tackled by Hawkeye, Iron Man, and the Wasp. Oh, my God. The three fucking dumbest Avengers yeah are the ones that are like, get him.
02:15:38
Speaker
You're Iron Man, dude. Don't attack Magneto. Yeah.
02:15:45
Speaker
oh Oh, anyway. Doom is cooked. The Beyonder digs deep into his psyche and then starts dissecting half his body like a science diagram. He's keeping Doom alive as he does this, which is all the opportunity Doom needs.
02:16:02
Speaker
This is cool. Literally half a man. He reaches out for his nearby armor with his good half caps and Wolverine work together to free the bad guys from their prisons just before the fortress collapses on them.
02:16:19
Speaker
Discovering their respect for each other's morals. Oh, Wolverine knew this fucking. He knew this. He's met Captain a America. Whatever. Look.
02:16:31
Speaker
Just as they escape the building, though, they find a giant galacticized Doctor Doom waiting for them. Oh, no. No, then he shrinks down to regular size. Oh, good. Explaining, he just forgot he was huge. He's come to talk. the Beyonder is dead.
02:16:45
Speaker
the war is over. Oh, good. Okay. That's the end. That's the end of Secret Wars. Wait, no, ah Pat, you've got ah actually ah some comics to read. Yeah, i know. The editors note at the end, even though the last line is Doom saying, the war is over.
02:17:03
Speaker
The narrator's like, but please come back. But it's not over. ah Come back. Please buy. Also, please also buy some toys. Please money. Which brings us to Secret Wars number 11 and Dust to Dust.
02:17:18
Speaker
Finishing the sentence from the issue before, death to the beyonder. Who can forget that Shakespearean saying? Victor Von Doom stands in front of the heroes with his mask off and face fully healed. He's very handsome.
02:17:36
Speaker
He's a handsome man. Telling them that he has absorbed the power of the beyonder and is now omnipotent. He could destroy them all with a thought, but means them no harm. The war is over.
02:17:48
Speaker
I heard that somewhere. The villains watch this annoyed and wonder what to do until the molecule man is like, I'm going to kill him. He attacks doom, but doom shows him that his molecule power is actually limitless.
02:18:01
Speaker
It can even control organic molecules. Doom sends him back to the villains where he decides to lead them. Now they all go to the little scrap of Denver. They got pulled into the planet and hang out at Volcana's apartment.
02:18:14
Speaker
Yeah, it's like, let's just hang out at her apartment. She's like, we can go to my place. That's a good new lair, right? And it's like, yeah, cool. When they're all like, I don't care about this anymore. want to go home. Molecule Man's like, okay.
02:18:27
Speaker
And flies the Denver chunk off into space, presumably all the way back to Earth. Yeah. Meanwhile, the heroes all go back to their base to go to bed. A lot of people go into bed. Also, man, the way they get there is Okay.
02:18:47
Speaker
Reed Richards turns himself into a big bag. Oh, yeah. every and And Iron Man flies it with all the heroes in it like they're carting action figures in a grocery, in a sack. Right, yeah. got You stuff them in your grocery bag to get them from the house to the car you can play while your parents drive to the grocery store. You take your blankie and you turn it into a bindle and you put your action figures in it. Colossus takes off on a little sky sled to go see Zaji.
02:19:16
Speaker
it's it's it is... That's just what I called it. But yeah, it is a space jet ski. Flying jet ski. And he's just like a big buff man. Like are I'm going. He's he sneaks into a room in the middle of the night while she's sleeping. Dude, you don't wake her up and gives her flowers.
02:19:39
Speaker
You don't know this fucking woman. You wouldn't think this would work. If it was anybody but Jim Stupid, this would probably be an easy rejection. Then again, remember when Colossus fucked all those ladies in um the Savage Land?
02:19:53
Speaker
Well, yeah, but that was, he he didn't, for all we know, he didn't sneak up on them in the middle of the night. Yeah, that's true. i just I imagine he's irresistible to women. Plus, that is not something we projected on it. i'm' A little spoiler alert. We definitely 100% know we fucked those ladies.
02:20:12
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. i Also, he brought flowers. He did bring flowers. That's charming. He's charming. Back in the base, some energy takes control of the Hulk and then Spider-Woman, and she witnesses Doom restore Captain Marvel, reclaim Claw, and leave a message for the heroes to meet him at the Tower of Doom tomorrow. I had so much... I had i had to rewrite this because I had trouble figuring this out um because...
02:20:44
Speaker
This little piece of energy we hear comes from Doom's tower, and at the same time, we know Doom is sneaking in to leave this message. Yes, but this little burst of energy popping from head to head is not Dr. Doom. Is not Dr. Doom, even though...
02:21:02
Speaker
It is, it would feel obvious, like the obvious assumption to make. ah Yeah, yeah. By the way, there is a Tower of Doom now. Yeah. It is a giant golden rock structure. And Hulk and Spider-Woman don't remember being possessed.
02:21:22
Speaker
Oh. The X-Men notice that Colossus is missing and Wolverine thinks Peter's whole obsession is a side effect of Zaji's healing powers. So this is what you said. And I had never thought of that. and But that's, I mean, interesting. Yeah. and it's interesting because, and Wolverine says this out loud, it's not just that her healing process makes you fall in love with her.
02:21:44
Speaker
Her returning that love appears to be part of the healing process as well. Yeah, right. Like, you need – you don't just need literal healing. You also need emotional care. And as Wolverine and says, he's like – And sex. And sex. lots of sex. As Wolverine says –
02:22:03
Speaker
what This is an alien world. What does love even mean to Zashi? It's not like she's being evil or being manipulative. like Love might mean something different to her than it means in our culture, which yes is a really smart thing to say. This is like the only time that he writes Wolverine well in this entire series. Yes, he's got the he's got the instincts to suss suss out honeypot. He says, I can understand a man following his heart, going with what feels right. There's no honor lost in that.
02:22:37
Speaker
But can he see it's just a side effect of like, yeah, like he's just fucking. And it's Nightcrawler who comes to him to talk to talk about this, that even though Nightcrawler's dialogue is not very Nightcrawler. It's still like that is the right dynamic.
02:22:52
Speaker
It's such a a is he's so close. Kurt and Logan chats are usually so enjoyable. But in these in in this run, it's always just like, hey, why is this happening?
02:23:07
Speaker
Oh, here's why. Yeah, that's all Nightcrawler does. This whole and besides when he's misspeaking German, he is just asking about stuff. Yeah, there are there's barely a Kurt Rupert in this one.
02:23:20
Speaker
No. Anyway, they all go to Doom Tower and Doom tells them that since he's been reborn, he wants to fix everything he's done wrong. He restores Kang to life and sends him home to show he means it. This is not the most helpful first action you can take. I saved your one of your biggest supervillains and I send him home.
02:23:41
Speaker
I send him back to Earth where you live. Yeah.
02:23:47
Speaker
He can't fuck with the time stream, so he'll only fix what he's done the past few days and grant the heroes a wish. Mr. Fantastic is confident he can get the heroes home himself, apparently, which he hasn't revealed up until now. Yeah, and how does he know that? at Whatever.
02:24:04
Speaker
So they decline Doom's offer entirely. But when they leave, Spider-Woman is missing. So Cap goes back in after her. He finds Doom just chilling. While elsewhere, Spider-Woman captures Claw.
02:24:17
Speaker
And the little possession energy jumps into him. Ooh. Doom tells Cap he's transcended all human desire, and so even though he's omnipotent, he doesn't want to harm anyone or rule anything. All he wants to do is reclaim his mother's soul from Mephisto and then continue to chill.
02:24:36
Speaker
There's some cool stuff here. Captain America clearly makes some observations about Doom in this conversation. And yeah and doesn't say it doesn't say he says he said he like imply he says it a little bit.
02:24:52
Speaker
And then he's like, well, all right, I'm just gonna leave and then leaves and then comes to the heroes and tells them which we'll find out tells them what he observed. i I think this scene was cool.
02:25:07
Speaker
I that's two cool scenes in a row. Hate to disagree with you, Matt. But I was sure is and was really let me say this. I don't disagree with you, Matt, but okay I was sure.
02:25:25
Speaker
This is where Doom would recount to Captain America how he defeated the Beyonder and we would get to see that moment. Finally. ah No, you don't get to see good stuff. We don't ever see that moment. We don't ever see that. Not ever!
02:25:42
Speaker
We don't see Pastor Fantastic talking to Galactus. We don't see... There's a lot we don't see. We don't see Galactus being revived. We hear about it in a ah line of dialogue from Doctor... He's like, oh, ah Galactus was revived, so I don't have to do anything there.
02:25:59
Speaker
Nova did it.
02:26:03
Speaker
Soon. Soon. The heroes, including Colossus, fresh returned from boning Zaji. Okay. Gather at a big table. Again, confirmed. They boned. Also well in confirmed. Well, is this one confirmed? I mean, the the. Yeah. Well, he's nude. They're both nude when he gets the call from. Except here's what we also confirm.
02:26:25
Speaker
Colossus leaves the boots on. He removed everything else. Yeah. But he's wearing his boots. big knee hier um Okay. Yeah.
02:26:40
Speaker
Captain America thinks leaving doom this powerful is too dangerous given that he claims to be above human desires, but healed his own face scars and is trying to resurrect his mom. see that Smart, smart writing. That is good. Yeah. Yeah.
02:26:54
Speaker
So all the heroes agree they're going to take down doom. Xavier even adds that the possibility of Doom using subtle manipulation to control reality is just as bad.
02:27:05
Speaker
All right, Professor ex Xavier. You're just repeating Captain America's point and saying it's your own. Plus, you're Professor Charles Xavier.
02:27:17
Speaker
That's fair.
02:27:21
Speaker
The only one who argues back is Colossus, who doesn't want to attack a man unprovoked. Very Colossus. But then he worries he's only saying this out of selfishness because he found love with Zaj. Okay, fucking Christ.
02:27:36
Speaker
Captain America reminds him of the danger and tells him that the vote has to be unanimous. If Colossus doesn't want to fight, they won't fight. But Peter finally relents.
02:27:48
Speaker
ah They will fight.
02:27:52
Speaker
Then in the funniest page turn reveal in history, the entire hero base explodes, killing everyone.
02:28:02
Speaker
Oh, this was a good issue. This was good. The one good issue in the whole I will give it is a that last moment is a slap in the face.
02:28:16
Speaker
Oh, my God. Dramatic irony where the moment before you turn the page, Captain America is like, boy, i hope we're making the right decision.
02:28:27
Speaker
If we're not, maybe a a bolt of energy will strike us down out of the blue. And then you turn the page after Colossus votes. And exactly that happens. It's so funny because he's like, they're just talking.
02:28:41
Speaker
And the conversation goes on for a while. And everyone kind of weighs in. And some people have different thoughts. um Even there's a scene. There's ah there's a moment.
02:28:51
Speaker
People are nervous. Like, Nightcrawler's gripping his own tail while he says yes. Yeah, yeah. And they're even like, a Doom could be listening in on us right now.
02:29:03
Speaker
Yes. And they're like, look, the universe... is in our hands, but we could walk away. We could walk away right now, and that's fine. If anyone of you doesn't want to do this, i am I am okay. And it's very calm. It's very measured. And Peter starts crying, and he's like, I don't know if I'm just being selfish. And Captain America says, only you know that, son.
02:29:32
Speaker
And Colossus says, at meaning... Doesn't matter if you're being selfish or not. If you say no, none of us will fight. Yeah, we all say no. and like peter's There's no wrong decision you can make here. Peter's like, forgive me, Zaji. I say yes.
02:29:47
Speaker
We fight. Boom! Boom! Very good. Okay. Took us 11 issues. oh we got to the good issue of there some secret wars and the next issue won't be good so it is just there's one good yeah yeah well let's not uh number not waste number any more time we have to dot dot dot nothing to fear which finishes the sentence from number 11 and dust to dust
02:30:23
Speaker
Literally every good guy is dead. Fully, literally dead. Doom looks over what he's done with Claw. Killing them was necessary.
02:30:34
Speaker
But it reminds him of how much power he has and how dangerous that might be. Claw, more lucid than we've seen him to this point, encourages him to relax a little and then questions if Doom's sure he killed them all.
02:30:48
Speaker
of
02:30:51
Speaker
Of course he did. Millions... A miles away, though. Little interlude. The suburb of Denver floats through space while the bad guys hang out in Volcano's apartment. Enchantress draws a bath and summons a water elemental who fills us in on the Beyonder's details. He was god of his realm, fully content. Then some event ripped a hole from his realm into ours. Okay, guys, listen up.
02:31:19
Speaker
This is where the metaphor of this being Jim Shooter. Who? I i think I said James Stupid. oh I was just, i i I drank a milkshake a minute ago, so I think I had something stuck in my throat.
02:31:31
Speaker
He was god of this realm, fully content, until some event ripped a hole in from his realm into ours. You know, as if um an editor-in-chief maybe finally picked up the comics and read them.
02:31:49
Speaker
He became curious about the nature of humans... Or, you know writing characters, and especially on their sense of desire. So he eventually gathered a bunch of good guys and bad guys to learn about human desire.
02:32:06
Speaker
Or learn how to make money by making them fight each other or something. Right. Learn about how he's better at writing the characters than anybody else by writing them all at once.
02:32:18
Speaker
The Beyonder is also still alive, too weak to act, but waiting nearby for a moment of opportunity. Yeah, there's some key pieces of information there. Sure. In the living room, Molecule Man pops up out of nowhere to show them that he's actually been practicing his power for warp jumps, proving it to everyone by showing them stars in the sky. I guess this this is to justify how the bad guys all end up back on Earth, because this is...
02:32:42
Speaker
The last we see of them. They're gone. It's a good moment where Dr. Octopus is like, i I know he's flying us back, but we were millions of light years away from Earth. yeah does Does he understand that this is going to... Even at light speed? Even at light speed, we will get back. It'll take us millions. yeah So yeah, we don't see any of the villains again, except for Lizard and Enchantress. who like enchant like they I don't know, they get in a fight and they go...
02:33:13
Speaker
Lizard scratches Enchantress's face. She so she kills him and uses his life energy to transport back to Asgard. So that's how they she gets home, and that's why we don't care about Lizard anymore.
02:33:25
Speaker
She also, so she teleports back to the the planet, and for the first time in the series, she refers to it, any that anybody refers to it as Battleworld. Oh!
02:33:37
Speaker
they the The fucking... ah the The location for Contest of Champions? Yeah, the na the narrator refers to it of as Battleworld. Yeah, what the fuck? oh Is that the location of Contest of Champions? I don't know anything about Contest of Champions.
02:33:53
Speaker
I thought that when it took place on Battleworld, but I don't know, Matt. I'm not following Contest of Champions. ah You don't have to write in to correct us. We're not following Contest of Champions. um Doom dozes while Claw, eyes crackling with power, creeps up on him. There's this smart thing. Where Doom keeps being like, I don't sleep anymore. I'm all powerful.
02:34:17
Speaker
And then he keeps falling asleep. Right. There's also some smart writing in this issue. I don't think this issue is all ultimately good, but there's some smart writing in it. The Doom stuff is good. And that's the thing is Jim's stupid.
02:34:29
Speaker
at but If there's one character he understands in this whole thing, it's Dr. Doom. And it took him like three issues, but i like yeah three issues and he started to understand Doom. Yeah. suddenly doom wakes up chiding claw for letting him almost almost fall asleep he says he could lose control of his powers if he sleeps allowing his subconscious whims to reshape reality he says yeah is we run into the flick problem here again where he says a casual fuck of my little finger might blacken a star system
02:35:12
Speaker
Oh, man. Claw's really, really focused on the idea that Doom maybe didn't really didn't really kill them. Or he subconsciously revived them right after killing them, and it's driving Doom nuts. So he asks Claw to play out exactly how that would work. Come on That's not real.
02:35:32
Speaker
Claw's like, okay, if you let's get this out of the way. you're so showing me your stupid idea. Claw explains, wouldn't it have been great, Patrick, if it was Lockheed that came back and revived everybody?
02:35:49
Speaker
Oh my god. Oh my god. The one hero who, or the lizard! or the lizard who is like, i i i love the wasp now.
02:36:02
Speaker
And then he finds her body, and then he turns back into Kurt Connors, And uses his fucking brilliant science brain to fix her? There's so many threads here that he could have pulled, but no.
02:36:16
Speaker
All right. After they left, Zaji could have seen the explosion and rushed to the scene and used her whole life force to revive Colossus, who was dead, but maybe less dead than the others because he was steeled up.
02:36:33
Speaker
Zaji would die from the effort, but Colossus would find Reed Richards, who is also dead, but maybe less dead than the others because of his elasticity, and put him in the machine that heals you.
02:36:45
Speaker
Then Reed could have built a device to heal everyone else back to life, and they'd be on their way here right now. Doom tells Claw to shut up!
02:36:56
Speaker
Shut up, Claw. But he's clearly bothered by the idea. That's all it takes as Thor's hammer comes flying through the wall. The good guys are here.
02:37:09
Speaker
Good moment. Good moment. So... with
02:37:16
Speaker
Yes. Except for we don't know what actually happened. we and Good moment. We could you know... we could use you know ah in a rare event through this series, we could use just a little more exposition here, I think, because what i'm pretty sure happened.
02:37:34
Speaker
Well, sorry, actually, let me not get into it, but it's, it is not clear. is not made clear to us. And we can theorize about this in a minute. Once a few twists happen, but it is not clear how the heroes arrived back here. Last time we saw them, they were correct all very dead.
02:37:54
Speaker
Doom tries to power up, but loses control of the power quickly. He's too rattled by all this and almost destroys the whole universe. Klaue knows how to fix the situation. Doom can just transfer a small fraction of his godly power to Klaue to fight the good guys for him.
02:38:09
Speaker
He does exactly that. Klaue goes outside and creates a bunch of... Why does this next part happen at all? I guess just to keep up the illusion.
02:38:20
Speaker
But why does he need to keep up the illusion at this point? you To stall for time. Okay. But why does he need to stall for time? yeah Claw goes outside and creates a bunch of monsters, but when Captain America pushes through and goes to attack Doom, Claw doesn't stop him. Well, he pretends to. He gets kicked in the face. do sure Cap runs right at Doom, so Doom powers up and zaps him, vaporizing him on the spot, but Moments later, Cap materializes again and is still charging at Doom.
02:38:53
Speaker
We go through this cycle a few times before Cap is close enough to bonk Doom on the head. Again, kind of a cool moment. Yeah, and you can figure out what's happening here even though there's there's not much explanation for it. Right, right.
02:39:08
Speaker
Suddenly, the fabric of the universe starts to come apart. The Beyonder emerges from Claw's head and zaps all his power back from Doom. and suddenly Claw, Doom, and the Beyonder all disappear.
02:39:23
Speaker
Everybody returns to base and waits for Reed to finish his device that can get them all home that they apparently could have been working on this whole time instead of fighting a secret war.
02:39:36
Speaker
Everybody gets some literal wish fulfillment from the residual energy of the Beyonder getting his power back. yeah they what happens here i know spider-man finds some food because he was very hungry and finally he finds some alien food uh they in america wishes his shield back to health because it had shattered lockheed comes back lockheed comes back they're like oh wish lockheed were here yeah and he comes back with another dragon in tow yeah yeah that which wit might come into play in the next x-men i wonder you Kurt Connors appears. I don't know if that's anybody's wish, but he does.
02:40:17
Speaker
hes He was dead. Why does Kurt Connors appear? Because nobody's dead in this fucking thing. So like she's za so apparently Enchantress just zapped the lizard out of him.
02:40:27
Speaker
ah Xavier tells Storm he's going to take more of a team leadership role with the X-Men. i get Fucking... Jim Stupid telling Chris Claremont what to do with this comic. Everyone goes home except Ben Grimm for some reason who sends She-Hulk back to take his place in the FF.
02:40:44
Speaker
The end, I guess. I guess. Also, I don't remember where, but somebody says Chippy again. I think Wolverine says, oh yeah, yeah, Lockheed returns with some Chippy. e So it's not a female human that he's saying it about, but it's still... A chippy. The disrespect is still there. So, okay.
02:41:07
Speaker
The Beyonder is stowed away in Klaue's head. He's the little piece of possession that was moving from creature to creature, right? My best theory as to how the heroes got here, how they came back to life, is that...
02:41:24
Speaker
the beyonder in claw's body knew that doom had the power to resurrect all the heroes yes and so but that doom didn't quite have control so he was still able and this is said pretty plainly his subconscious could possibly take actions that he didn't actually intend to take or subconsciously intended to take yeah So this, as he tells the story of how the heroes could have survived, is him manipulating Doom into subconsciously making that happen. Exactly.
02:42:03
Speaker
And so it does happen. But he's also, during the story, he keeps suggesting, like... Maybe this already happened. Maybe this is the actual events that transpired. Right. You just didn't realize you're doing. So both possibilities are on the table. And it's Doom.
02:42:18
Speaker
Doom has the ability. He's not constrained by time. Right. So he could have made this have ah already happened. because this would have taken a while to all occur. Right. You forget that there's a temporal element here, but there is. ah So, um yes, I think that's exactly what's going on. He notices that when Doom starts to get sleepy, he makes things happen. So he tells him a long story with moving picture images so that Doom makes these things happen in his subconscious.
Anticlimactic Ending Discussion
02:42:51
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. And he even says, like, this is all ah so unlikely and there's, like, impossibilities in your story. And he's like, Klaus is like, well, it's not impossible if they you did it.
02:43:05
Speaker
You helped them along with your powers. Yeah. If you had already done this. Yeah. They'd be right here. um So that's what happens. And then when... Captain America keeps coming back to life. That's the Beyonder's power in Claw's head doing it over and over.
02:43:23
Speaker
Yes. Yeah. Yeah. yeah That part's a little more obvious. Yes. So, yeah. I mean, everybody then goes back. They go back home. And it's just like, that's the end. It's so anticlimactic. Like,
Lockheed's Puzzling Role
02:43:38
Speaker
we don't ever see the Beyonder.
02:43:40
Speaker
We don't ever talk to the Beyonder. We don't ever get... the big fight between heroes and, but well, I guess we get it like a thousand times, but in stupid ways. Yeah. We don't ever.
02:43:51
Speaker
When we get it, it's not action. It is a tableau. Right. We also, we, yeah, we don't get a confrontation between the heroes and the beyond. and We don't get any of it.
02:44:03
Speaker
No, it, we don't even get to see the confrontations. We do see. We never see the end of it's just like, and then the battle ended. Oh, also when they send the,
02:44:14
Speaker
all the X-Men home, the other dragon, the chippy flies into the teleporter. Yeah. With them. So goes home with all the X-Men. Yeah.
02:44:24
Speaker
Lockheed shows up and then immediately disappears. He's in issue one and issue 12. Yeah. yeah No reason for him to be there.
02:44:35
Speaker
Why did you do it?
80s Superhero Cartoons
02:44:36
Speaker
Yeah. It's, yeah. So what'd you think? Did you enjoy this one? um Okay, my final thoughts are, um i have one, i have i have some really actually big final thoughts about how this um this one was. um Molecule Man and Wasp have the same uniform.
02:44:55
Speaker
He's got an eye out. Something could buy out. If you had time machine that would like try out. He can't deal with it.
02:45:05
Speaker
Get us away from this story, Pat. Pat steals and deals. Why didn't we do one of these last episode, Matt? if We, uh... Let's go, bub. oh ah Wolverine wants you to hurry it on.
02:45:19
Speaker
Okay, sorry, sorry, sorry. we're I know we're running long here. I i do have to say, Matt, who in the spirit of transparency, you know, as I've mentioned before, that I spent my vast fortune collecting every issue of the X-Men comics. Yes.
02:45:35
Speaker
But not necessarily the ancillary titles. Right. By the time I was able to get to some of those extra non X-Men titles that were reading, a lot of those ads had been banished to far off realm. Right.
02:45:51
Speaker
Forced to fight each other for the privilege of being sold. Yeah. oh That's normal. Secret Wars. Didn't have any ads in it, unfortunately. yeah This is an ad from ah a very similar time from an X-Men comic, actually.
02:46:10
Speaker
Oh, okay. So listen up. Marvel Productions presents The Amazing Spider-Man and the Incredible Hulk, premiering Saturday, September 17th on NBC.
02:46:22
Speaker
Oh. Okay. Matt, this is the it's the... It is the Spider-Man and Friends cartoon and the far less successful Incredible Hulk cartoon yeah that aired in the 80s. They tried to make so many Hulk cartoons and all of them failed. I remember they tried to make one when we were kids, too, to, like, win... The X-Men cartoon and the ah Spider-Man cartoon were successful. They tried to make an Avengers cartoon. It failed. They tried to make an Iron Man cartoon. It would it did a little bit better than some of the these other ones I'm about to mention. They did a Hulk cartoon. It failed.
02:46:57
Speaker
Yeah. um was there Fantastic Four. There was a Fantastic Four cartoon. It failed. i But this one, bees so this is this predates that this is the mid eighty s The year Spider-Man and Friends cartoon is iconic. It is ah frequently memed, especially if you were on the internet in like 2012. There were a lot of screenshots from it popping up. It's corny. There's a scene where he's sitting at a desk and people make it look like he's masturbating. and There's a scene where he write there's he's pointing at himself.
02:47:32
Speaker
the two Spider-Men pointing at each other yeah thing. a lot of you do A lot of others, plenty of others. It is a corny, goofy show. It's not worth your time unless you're very bored and maybe a little bit high. But hey, that's me all the time. so Well, Spider-Man teams up in this show. like is two His two best friends are Iceman, which is interesting because Iceman isn't really in the X-Men at this moment.
02:48:02
Speaker
Right. And also when we've seen the two of them meet, it has been contentious. Yes. ah Number two, Firestar. Because of legal, the rights, there were legal rights with the Human Torch character.
02:48:16
Speaker
Right. CBS owns the rights to the Human Torch's television production. Yeah. um So they created a girl named Firestar who, huh, I wonder if we're just ever going to meet her.
02:48:32
Speaker
No, if she was just made up for a cartoon. We probably won't meet her anytime, anytime ever. So how much does
Challenges of Long Episode and Audience Hope
02:48:38
Speaker
this cost? i Nothing. It's the cost of a TV antenna in 1984, What was the cost of the TV antenna in 1984, Pat?
02:48:50
Speaker
Well, you probably already had one. Oh, I thought you were setting it up. Oh, no. oh and I'm not following 1984. I don't know. I'm not following George Orwell. Well...
02:49:02
Speaker
That is an interesting Pat Steals and Deals. This is when it happens. This is when Saturday Morning Cartoons finally get some superheroes. He's got an eye out. Stuff that could buy out. If you had time machine that you would like to try out.
02:49:19
Speaker
It's Pat Steals and Deals. Oh boy, Patrick, I'm sleepy. This was a lot of comics. This was 12 comics that we recapped in just under three hours. How how are you? Let me just ask. How are you holding up?
02:49:38
Speaker
I'm doing okay. I feel bad ah that we have another long episode coming out. But but it was worth it. Do you think our listeners enjoyed it?
02:49:51
Speaker
I think they enjoyed us. I hope. that nobody enjoyed Secret Wars. That is my sincere hope for everyone that reads it. If they
Patreon Perks and Support
02:50:00
Speaker
enjoyed us, what are some things they can do show it? Oh, man.
02:50:04
Speaker
Matt, they can follow us on Instagram at MutantMenacePod. They can like, they can subscribe, they can comment, they can rate or review us wherever possible. It doesn't matter where, just do it somewhere. Just do it somewhere. It'll increase the visibility and then people who don't know about this but would like it might see it and then they can decide for themselves you're not you're forcing it on anybody yeah you're not the boss of them yeah you're just you're just leading them to water lead them to water let them drink uh you can also join our die of thirst rion we do have a free tier we also have a paid tier we also have a promise out there right now that if we reach
02:50:48
Speaker
$100 for a full cycle, we will drink Pilk ourselves. If we reach $150 for a cycle, we will drink... What was it? Pepsi, which is Buffalo sauce in Pepsi. If we reach $500 for three consecutive cycles, we've been... and People have been making sure we'll hold up our end on this, Matt. We will drink Bilk, Buffalo sauce in milk. It will also qualify us for...
02:51:18
Speaker
bepsi and pilk which means we might as well at that point just drink see what it tastes like when we drink bepsilk we should drink bepsilk we said we would do that for five hundred dollars $500 for three consecutive months. But if we do $500, that also triggers something that is like a longstanding thing, which is that we will do a next right a second podcast that you guys, a second monthly podcast that you guys will be able to vote on. But if you join the Patreon now, um for any amount of money,
02:51:54
Speaker
For free, you get to see our reading lists and get to keep up with us. But for any amount of money, you get outtakes. You get ah Puffy Faffin' with Matt and Pat, which is just our goof around bullshit 15-minute podcast that we release when we feel like it. And you might get some other cool stuff. so Also, one more note on the Patreon.
02:52:18
Speaker
Somebody, ah presumably upon hearing... the offer in the episode and presumably for the sake of the bit has ups their donation to $50 per month. so So if you actually dangerously close to having to drink pilk, if you don't want to be outdone by them, or you just want to, if you're just like, Oh man, if two of us give $20, these guys will have to drink pilk. Yeah.
02:52:47
Speaker
But I don't want to be begging for money. It's just a funny thing that happened. Yeah,
Ending Thank Yous and Humor
02:52:51
Speaker
yeah. All of this is weird foods. All of this we do ah just to be silly. If we were in it for money, we wouldn't be doing a podcast.
02:53:03
Speaker
All right. You can email us a Pat's email for email to be on Pat's email corner. You can email us mutantmenacepod at gmail.com. I want to give a big fucking thanks. To our good pals, Krils Wilson for doing the music for the show, and to Julius Selle for the voice of Trish Tilby. Now, I think there's nothing else to say, Pat.
02:53:25
Speaker
No, Matt, we still gotta say the thing we say at the end of every episode. Oh, I forgot. Even though i say even though we say it at the end of every episode, I forgot. Always remember, I am not Skeeter McFerrin anymore. And, as always...
02:53:41
Speaker
you Just remember, baby, I'll tumble for you.
02:53:54
Speaker
I want to read you a quote here and you tell me if this is Jim Stupid talking about Captain America or Homer Simpson talking about his character Poochie. Poochie needs to be louder, angrier and have access to a time machine.
02:54:10
Speaker
Whenever Poochie is not on screen, all the other characters should be asking, where's Poochie?
02:54:19
Speaker
Who said it?